Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Feather, Martin.
A viewgraph presentation describing the NASA Software Assurance Research Program (SARP) research infusion projects is shown. The topics include: 1) Background/Motivation; 2) Proposal Solicitation Process; 3) Proposal Evaluation Process; 4) Overview of Some Projects to Date; and 5) Lessons Learned.
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This paper describes an approach to risk assessment and analysis suited to the early phase, concurrent design of a space mission. The approach integrates an agile, multi-user risk collection tool, a more in-depth risk analysis tool, and repositories of risk information. A JPL developed tool, named RAP, is used for collecting expert opinions about risk from designers involved in the concurrent design of a space mission. Another in-house developed risk assessment tool, named DDP, is used for the analysis.
Contents include the following: Problem. Hypothesis. Approach. Importance/Benefits. Relevance to NASA. Accomplishments. Next Steps.
Software assurance is the planned and systematic set of activities that ensures that software processes and products conform to requirements, standards, and procedures. Examples of such activities are the following: code inspections, unit tests, design reviews, performance analyses, construction of traceability matrices, etc. In practice, software development projects have only limited resources (e.g., schedule, budget, and availability of personnel) to cover the entire development effort, of which assurance is but a part. Projects must therefore select judiciously from among the possible assurance activities. At its heart, this can be viewed as an optimization problem; namely, to determine the allocation of limited resources (time, money, and personnel) to minimize risk or, alternatively, to minimize the resources needed to reduce risk to an acceptable level. The end result of the work reported here is a means to optimize quality-assurance processes used in developing software.
The problem that we address in this paper is assessing the expected degree of success of the system or mission based on the degree to which each requirement is satisfied and the relative weight of the requirements. We assume a complete list of the requirements, the relevant risk elements and their probability of occurrence and the quantified effect of the risk elements on the requirements. In order to assess the degree to which each requirement is satisfied, we need to determine the effect of the various risk elements on the requirement.
The problem that we address in this paper is assessing the expected degree of success of the system or mission based on the degree to which each requirement is satisfied and the relative weight of the requirements.
The focus of this paper is on the integration of PRA and DDP. The intent is twofold: to extend risk-based decision though more of the lifecycle, and to lead to improved risk modeling (hence better informed decision making) wherever it is applied, most especially in the early phases as designs begin to mature.
We develop spacecraft fault-protection software at NASA/JPL. Challenges exemplified by our task: 1) high-quality systems - need for extensive validation & verification; 2) multi-disciplinary context - involves experts from diverse areas; 3) embedded systems - must adapt to external practices, notations, etc.; and 4) development pressures - NASA's mandate of "better, faster, cheaper".
GTE is the Command and Control contractor for the Domain Specific Software Architectures program. The objective of this program is to develop and demonstrate an architecture-driven, component-based capability for the automated generation of command and control (C2) applications. Such a capability will significantly reduce the cost of C2 applications development and will lead to improved system quality and reliability through the use of proven architectures and components. A major focus of GTE's approach is the automated generation of application components in particular subdomains. Our initial work in this area has concentrated in the message handling subdomain; we have defined and prototyped an approach that can automate one of the most software-intensive parts of C2 systems development. This paper provides an overview of the GTE team's DSSA approach and then presents our work on automated support for message processing.