Purpose
This website serves a documentation for the quality assurance process followed all Nyx tools, including Nyx itself, hifitime, and ANISE.
Audience¶
This documentation is provided to help the reader gain confidence in the tools developed under the Nyx Space umbrella. It is a good read for would-be contributors to the software suite so they can understand the development process.
In fact, the process outlined here removes the need for a dedicated QA role: most of the quality is assured through automated processes and supplemental QA is done by every engineer in the team. This process is designed to not get in the way of engineers: most reviews are asynchronous enabling engineers the pick up the next requirement to work on. In the case of the Nyx tools, all of the roles are typically fulfilled by a single person, me1: what's important is that I bring a critical to each review step.
Ultimate objective¶
This QA policy provides an easily-understood, easily-audited development arc, tracing requirements through code, unit test, integration, and validation. I've followed a similar process for a number of space projects in the past few years. I'm publishing it under a Creative Commons license in hopes that the broader space community finds this useful and hopefully even proposes enhancements to the process.
More generally, this website provides a free-to-use quality assurance process for spacecraft applications, with a focus on GNC, FSW, and astrodynamics quality assurances. The quality assurance of GNC and FSW teams is often limited, typically because no one is assigned to specific quality assurance roles. I hope this documentation can help teams write better and more tested software for space applications.
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Chris Rabotin ↩