Lawrence Z. Markosian

Building a Safety Case for a Safety-Critical NASA Space Vehicle Software System

We describe our development of a key portion of a safety case for a safety-critical piece of NASA software designed to operate on a NASA launch vehicle. The softwares purpose is to make real-time determinations of the presence of catastrophic failure conditions of that vehicle and react accordingly. We show how our safety case development applies a series of generic software considerations instantiated on the specifics of the NASA software system. We conclude that this approach is applicable to a wide range of NASA software systems.

The NASA software research infusion initiative: successful technology transfer for software assurance

New processes, methods and tools are constantly appearing in the field of software engineering. Many of these augur great potential in improving software development processes, resulting in higher quality software with greater levels of assurance. However, there are a number of obstacles that impede their infusion into software development practices. These are the recurring obstacles common to many forms of research. Practitioners cannot readily identify the emerging techniques that may most benefit them, and cannot afford to risk time and effort in evaluating and experimenting with them while there is still uncertainty about whether they will have payoff in this particular context. Similarly, researchers cannot readily identify those practitioners whose problems would be amenable to their techniques and lack the feedback from practical applications necessary to help them to evolve their techniques to make them more likely to be successful. This paper describes an ongoing effort conducted by a software engineering research infusion team, and the NASA Research Infusion Initiative, established by NASAs Software Engineering Initiative, to overcome these obstacles.

Software Assurance Research Infusion: The NASA Experience

We present the ongoing NASA research infusion initiative, a sub-group of the NASA software working group which encourages the use of advanced technologies and the products of software engineering research in NASA projects and missions. An emphasis is placed on technologies and products that address software assurance. Technology infusion is generally a difficult process, but the effort described here seems to have found a modest approach that is successful for some types of technologies. We outline the process and report on the outcomes of some infusions run over in the past. We also present some lessons learned from our experiences.

Infusing software engineering technology into practice at NASA

We present an ongoing effort of the NASA Software Engineering Initiative to encourage the use of advanced software engineering technology on NASA projects. Technology infusion is in general a difficult process yet this effort seems to have found a modest approach that is successful for some types of technologies. We outline the process and describe the experience of the technology infusions that occurred over a two year period. We also present some lessons from the experiences

Architecting and generalizing a safety case for critical condition detection software: an experience report

Safety cases and, specifically, software safety cases, have had virtually no presence in engineering practice in the US. Recent interest, in addition to an early attempt to introduce them into practice in the NASA Constellation Program, motivated us to develop a partial safety case for a safety critical subsystem for the Ares I vehicle, namely the abort detection, notification and response (AFDNR) system. This paper relates our experience applying the safety case concept to AFDNR, particularly from the perspective of generalizing the safety issues to similar fault management systems. We also provide lessons learned, including a discussion of issues that led to our current refactoring of our initial safety case.