Cleanroom software engineering for flight systems: A preliminary report

This paper describes how Cleanroom software engineering practices are being applied to a systems integration testbed for a flight scientific instrument. This project offered several challenges to the Cleanroom process: hardware and software are being co-developed by the project team and hardware interfaces are uncertain; increments had to be defined that met a variety of (sometimes conflicting) risk-mitigation challenges; the project involved a high degree of concurrency and hard real-time operations; reliability requirements are extremely high; and the project team members were engineers and scientists by training, rather than experienced software engineers. In this paper we will look at how this project is addressing these challenges. We will see how the Cleanroom process was tailored by them, and examine some results of initial development increments.