Towards RegOps: A DevOps Pipeline for Medical Device Software

Abstract

<p>The manufacture of medical devices is a strictly regulated domain in the European Union. Traditionally, medical software compliance activities have been considered manual, document-centric, and burdensome. At the same time, over the last decade, software companies have maintained competitiveness and improved by relying on essential practices of DevOps, such as process automation and delivery pipelines. However, applying the same principles in medical software can be challenging due to regulatory requirements. In this paper, we utilize a systematic approach to align the essential medical device software regulatory requirements from the standards IEC 62304 and IEC 82304-1 and integrate them into the software delivery pipeline, which is the main contribution of our work. The outcome supports practitioners to establish more efficient software delivery models while maintaining compliance with the medical device standards.</p>