The Functional Safety Assessor checks the plan

Functional Safety Assessment (FSA) is necessary to make sure that professionals who worked on SIL projects actually did what we asked them to do. Did they follow the plan? One ore more professionals do the work, one ore more professionals verify the work, and one or more professionals assess that work. This it nothing special related to functional safety. This is just good engineering practice.

Typical Assessor tasks

Functional Safety Assessors should check things like:

• Which lifecycle where they suppose to follow and did they follow it?
• Who was responsible for which tasks in which lifecycle phase? Did that person actually carry out the work?
• Was the professional who carried out the work actually competent to do so?
• Was the work verified?
• Was the professional who carried out the verification actually competent?
• Did they use the correct input (documents) to carry out the work and verification?
• Did they make modifications? And if yes, did they follow the modification procedure?

These  are typical assessor questions. Notice that a true assessor should not be technical. Technical issues are the tasks of the verifier. True assessment is more on a higher level. This does of course not mean that the assessor should not be familiar (read be technical) with the subject. It will be tough to carry out an assessment if you are not familiar with SIL and functional safety. Btw in practice you will notice that the word Assessment is often used to represent verification. Not really correct but done a lot, e.g. , in the railway business it is like this.

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Functional Safety Assessment FAQ