ISO/IEC 15504-10: motivations for a new safety standard

ISO/IEC 15504 Part 10 Safety Extension has been recently developed in order to make consistent judgment regarding process capability or improvement priorities for safety related systems development. To avoid misunderstanding and confute reluctance and worry related to such a safety extension, its contents, purpose and intended usage are explained in this paper. The authors provide also a comparison between the ISO/IEC 15504 Part 10 and other existing safety standards for software (with particular focus on ISO/IEC 61508) as well as a discussion on possible integrations and consequent benefits of its usage.