Over the past 10 years, the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) Pressure Systems program facilitated a broader use of the NASGRO^® software for analyzing and sustaining pressure systems. By expanding the capabilities of NASGRO to incorporate Fitness-For-Service of ground-based pressure systems, NASA centers can take advantage of access to perpetual, royalty-free NASGRO licenses that realize a significant cost savings in agencywide software expenses.

In NASA software projects, requirements form the backbone of success, defining what the software must accomplish, how it should behave and the conditions under which it must operate. These requirements deliver mission-critical functionality and ensure software is developed safely, securely and with adherence to NASA’s stringent quality standards.

Software requirements analysis is a pivotal stage in the software development life cycle. It ensures that documented requirements accurately reflect operational needs and establish a solid foundation for design, development and implementation. Poorly defined requirements can lead to significant setbacks, including costly rework, safety risks and system failures. For NASA projects—where precision, safety and reliability are paramount—requirements analysis is not optional; it is a critical necessity.

The NASA Software Assurance Research Program (SARP) is sponsoring four research projects in Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 to benefit Software Assurance processes across the agency. The research program is aligned to support agency goals to improve how NASA performs Software Assurance activities.

As part of the Software Assurance Research Program (SARP), the project team leading the “Software Assurance Tasking Checklists for NASA-STD-8739.8” project developed and deployed a tool to automate the identification of Software Assurance (SA) activities using Commercial Off-The-Shelf tools. This checklist tool is one of five research projects in Fiscal Year 2020 sponsored by SARP and aimed to address the current needs of the SA community across the agency.

The Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) Software Assurance program recently updated NASA-STD-8739.8, NASA Software Assurance and Software Safety Standard — formerly NASA Software Assurance Standard.

“NASA Secure Software Engineering Portal,” a Software Assurance Research Program (SARP) project, intends to develop an online portal to provide user-friendly access to security-related software development knowledge.

“Automating Software Complexity Monitoring and Security Analysis,” a Software Assurance Research Program (SARP) project, intends to identify a set of complexity-related metrics and automatically generate them for use by Software Assurance personnel and developers throughout the entire software development process.

One Software Assurance Research Program (SARP) project, “Toward a Guide for Software Defect Tracking, Modeling, and Analysis,” intends to connect software Reliability growth models to practical software defect tracking.