The Data Safety Guidance

Current engineering standards for safety-critical systems do not address data explicitly. The cross-sector Data Safety Initiative Working Group (DSIWG) was set up by the Safety Critical Systems Club to address this issue. Their advice for best practice is published in “Data Safety Guidance”, pictured here, and downloadable from scsc.uk/scsc-127E.

The guidance provides a process for analysing the data safety of a system, identifying the safety-related data artefacts in the system, and provides a set of safety properties of the data to be considered. It the provides advice relating those properties to mitigations, in order to meet the required data safety assurance levels for the critical data artefacts. Documenting this process and the decisions made provides the outline of a Data Safety Case, which could become part of the system’s overall Safety Case, to be given to certification authorities, or used as evidence of adherance to best practice.

The guidance also lists over 25 reported cases of incidents where data has played a role, and we hear of more almost daily. ​