ISO/IEC 15504-10: Motivations for Another Safety Standard

This paper presents the new standard ISO/IEC 15504 Part 10 Safety Extension. It has been developed to extend the well-known ISO/IEC 15504 standard for process assessment and improvement in order to make consistent judgment regarding process capability or improvement priorities for safety related systems development. In order to avoid misunderstanding and confute reluctance and worry related to such a new standard, its contents, purpose and intended are explained in this paper. Moreover, comparison between the ISO/IEC 15504 Part 10 and other existing safety standards for software is provided as well as a discussion on possible integrations and consequent benefits of its usage.