Case Studies

Safety-critical development of a Railway system Component

(5 year engagement)

The client wished to develop new functionality in an existing safety-critical component.

It was maintaining a large volume of legacy code and design specific to the product.

Flagstaff provided support for the new development and design implementation: Analysis of the design by Flagstaff in the context of CENELEC EN 50128 revealed an entire level of over sixty legacy design documents was obsolete and no longer needed to be maintained – The substantial saving on the development time and costs and streamlining of the development process facilitated early delivery and provided for additional development opportunity with the existing product allowing extension of the product lifespan.

SCADA system development support

(3 year engagement)

Flagstaff was asked to provide support for a challenging project: The client had been contracted to provide a SCADA system for a major UK infrastructure development.

We were asked if we could assist an existing team of over forty engineers as they were failing to meet targets.

After a month of initial analysis Flagstaff agreed to provide a remote working team to supplement the existing group – We worked with the client to facilitate the remote working arrangement.

Once in place the Flagstaff team identified, proposed and helped to implement configuration control and fault reporting improvements which provided the client with vastly improved control of the development.

Our proposal and assistance in migration of the defect reporting system from a legacy to an up-to-date implementation revealed over 15% of logged defects were duplicates.

We then provided engineering expertise to address defects logged during integration and acceptance testing of the product.

Over three years we provided what the client acknowledged as essential experience and support to enable them to achieve a successful delivery of the system.

Development of power steering control software

(12 month engagement)

Flagstaff provided support to formalise the development of an electric power steering control system.

Our assessment of the system which had been prototyped highlighted areas which would not conform to the MISRA C rules. The Flagstaff proposal to produce an additional ‘monitor’ path of functionality was accepted and implemented. The system was successfully provided a safety case and was released on time and within budget.