Developing SEooC -Original Concepts and Implications when Extending to ADS

Reference life-cycle models as prescribed in safety standards shall never be interpreted as a timeline, but as depicting dependencies. In this paper we describe how we many years ago made this explicit to the ISO 26262 community, by introducing the concept of safety element out of context (SEooC). As the term then has become widely used, and sometimes filled with another meaning than what is the intention, this paper elaborates what is necessary to constitute an SEooC, emphasising the importance of of semantically unambiguous safety requirements, and reminding about that SEooC never can be used as an excuse not to follow a proper development process, i.e. it is never a "26262 light". SEooC is a form of component-based safety argumentation, and this paper shows how using the SEooC concept as a pattern all over a complex product structure, it fits well in modern agile product development with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Looking into the future, we claim that automated driving can never become successful without a strict formalization of a fine-grained product structure realized by SEooC in every piece.