Agile Approach to Adding Assurance and Mitigating Overall Mission Risk for Orion Software on EM-1
Human-rated missions like Orion are becoming exceedingly complex in terms of software contribution to achieving mission objectives, and this creates a resource challenge for everyone whose job is to add assurance that the mission is going to fly safely. Orion IV&V has addressed this challenge by providing focused assurance results of critical mission capabilities prioritized by a dynamic assessment of risk level. Prior to this approach, Orion IV&V was evaluating areas of risk in much broader, and more static, terms. Due to the Agile software development cycle that Orion follows, IV&V findings were often reported months out of phase with the developer. As a result of evolving the approach to providing assurance on Orion, IV&V is able to incrementally deliver high-priority assurance data and more impactful issues more in phase with the developer activities, thereby increasing the value of the findings to the project. The agile IV&V approach employed by the Orion IV&V team strives to achieve a cadence of delivery that matches the pace of development. This agile approach provides increased flexibility for the assurance provider to become more efficient in reporting assurance conclusions and issues. This presentation will discuss the principles which drive the design of our approach, results to date, and aspirations for long-term performance.