Easily Achieving DO and ARP Compliance

As an aero company, one of the biggest questions you have to answer is “how do I achieve necessary process and product compliance so that I can legally operate, without burdening and slowing down my engineering team?”  We’ve heard from partners across the industry that simply prompting a skilled team with “implement ARP-4754B Aircraft & System Guidelines” can send teams on a wild goose chase documenting every little change and design decision, losing the spirit of “applying best effort” then filling in the gaps after initial Proof of Concept.

While implementing Saphira, we’ve learned that the key facets that truly matter are:

1. Tracking Necessary Metadata in Place with Engineering Artifacts

2. Building Confidence in Hazard Identification, Recording, and Tracking

3. Developing Real-Time Referencing and Validation Against Relevant Standards

Below, we’ll describe how Saphira tackles each of these to help your team move beyond documentation roadblocks and focus on engineering safe, compliant products.

1. Achieving Traceability with Minimal Effort: In-Place Metadata Tracking

The key focus of each standard from ARP4761A (Safety Guidelines) to ARB4754 to DO-178C for Airborne SW and DO-254 for Avionics HW (Implementation Lifecycle Guidelines) is that your team should record traceability between intended functions across each system and component item, failure conditions, and produced requirements for mitigation.  Our belief is that, while, at certification time, an optimal approach will require templates like those from AFuzion, in the meantime, this information can and should be recorded in an easy location, such as in-line in code, CAD, and Jira tasks.

To ensure compliance is seamless, every step in the engineering process should connect directly with compliance information—without requiring engineers to switch tools or manually update documents. Compliance metadata, such as requirement references, design notes, and verification status, should be accessible directly alongside the work artifacts they relate to. This approach reduces repetitive documentation and makes compliance efforts virtually invisible to the engineering process.

For example, even before fully adopting tools like Saphira, as long as shared Google Sheets are used to establish IDs of requirements at different levels, they can easily be tied together across all these systems, even with simple scripts (some of which we’ve produced and can share!).

What about Configuration Management?  Many teams struggle to initially bootstrap a CM process: they create extensive internal spreadsheets where a single engineer collates and assesses changes.  Bootstrapping this process in Jira or using a solution like Saphira can ultimately massively reduce overhead of doing this, but in the meantime, knowing when it matters is all that matters: when you’re ready to release something and want to back up through changes that were made!  This can be as easy as making sure your team keeps a simple Google Doc updated as a changelog!

Saphira simplifies this by allowing your team to track metadata directly within your existing tools, creating an integrated system where every requirement, design note, and verification result is stored in place with relevant artifacts. This real-time tracking keeps critical compliance data up to date without adding overhead or workflow disruptions.  When time comes to collate all of it, we aggregate such information, as in this example illustration of collation from Jira and Gitlab.

2. Ensuring Safety with Minimal Overhead: Confident Hazard Identification and Tracking

Hazard tracking shouldn’t require complex workflows or duplicate efforts. To efficiently comply with ARP-4754B, teams need a streamlined way to record, assess, and mitigate hazards that integrates seamlessly into their safety-focused workflows. When hazard information is organized centrally, the entire team can maintain oversight and work proactively to address issues early.

However, if your team establishes a culture of simply rapidly assessing and recording the most critical hazards at each level of your system, you achieve an 80/20 of true risk reduction without immediate deeper analysis, much of which can be added back in after an initial prototype.  Imagine, for example, reverse engineering your Safety Assessment, starting with a statement of which risks are unacceptable.  Then, if risks are acceptable, it is satisfactory to deprioritize a full analysis of its trace through the system, to prioritize establishing traceability for the most critical risks.

Saphira supports this by making hazard identification, recording, and tracking straightforward. From the initial hazard identification phase to mitigation, Saphira provides tools that link hazards directly to related requirements, verification steps, and mitigation strategies, creating a single source of truth. This approach helps engineers address safety concerns in real-time without time-consuming cross-referencing. Saphira will soon launch the capability to systematically assess the risk and impact of particular hazards across system levels, enabling a clear view of your 80/20.

3. Staying Standards-Aligned Effortlessly: Real-Time Referencing and Validation

With thousands of pages to comb through, applying ARP and DO guidelines can feel overwhelming. Compliance becomes effortless when teams can easily access, reference, and validate standards directly within their workflow, without losing time or focus. Real-time referencing of standards is key, ensuring that engineers can validate their work continuously and stay aligned without manually tracking regulatory details.

Saphira’s intelligent standards search lets your team quickly locate relevant DO-178C and ARP-4754B sections based on subsystems, requirements, or functional needs. By making compliance requirements instantly accessible, Saphira allows engineers to verify compliance continuously and eliminates the need for separate, time-consuming searches.

Achieving Compliance Without Compromise

With minimal effort required, Saphira transforms compliance from a burden into a natural part of the engineering process. By focusing on in-place metadata tracking, hazard management, and real-time standards referencing, Saphira’s platform makes it possible to achieve compliance with DO-178C and ARP-4754B standards efficiently. This structured, automated framework enables your team to stay agile, innovative, and confidently compliant—ensuring your products are safe and market-ready without compromise.

Book a demo to get started today!