An Education-oriented ISO 26262 Interpretation Combined with Constructive Alignment

Safety standards (e.g., ISO 26262) define safety life-cycles to be adopted for the development of safety-critical systems. Professionals (i.e., safety engineers, safety managers, and, more broadly safety culture-aware personnel) who are responsible of the development of such systems can be, in turn, considered as safety-critical systems. Course-modules aimed at forming such professionals are critical. Given the criticality of such modules, the intended learning outcomes, before being constructively aligned [Biggs07] with teaching / learning / examination activities, should be derived by applying an education-oriented risk-driven process. The typical “what if” questions aimed at brainstorming on what if something goes wrong become essential to establish the expected stringency related to the knowledge and skills that personnel involved in the development of safety-critical systems should have. ISO 26262 defines a risk-driven safety life-cycle for developing safety-critical systems. In this paper, we give an education-oriented ISO 26262 interpretation and then we combine it with constructive alignment principles and we introduce SCA, Safety-critical Constructive Alignment, a new process to design Master’s level safety-critical courses or modules. To illustrate SCA and its potential effectiveness, we then apply it to design a specific module.