United Space Alliance Ensures Consistency in NASA’s Orion Software with LDRA

How USA stream­lined com­pli­ance, auto­mat­ed test­ing, and improved pro­duc­tiv­i­ty across mis­sion-crit­i­cal aero­space pro­grams.

What is it about

Sup­port­ing Unit­ed Space Alliance in deliv­er­ing safe, reli­able, and stan­dards-com­pli­ant soft­ware for NASA’s Orion crew explo­ration vehi­cle through LDRA proven ver­i­fi­ca­tion and analy­sis tools.

Pioneering Space Operations with NASA

Found­ed in 1996, Unit­ed Space Alliance (USA) is a space oper­a­tions com­pa­ny jointly owned by The Boe­ing Com­pa­ny and Lock­heed Mar­tin Cor­po­ra­tion. As NASA’s pri­ma­ry indus­try part­ner, USA has been respon­si­ble for day-to-day man­age­ment of the space shut­tle fleet and for plan­ning, train­ing, and oper­at­ing shut­tle and Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion mis­sions. Today, USA devel­ops soft­ware for a wide range of NASA pro­grams and space­craft, includ­ing Orion, NASA’s next-gen­er­a­tion crew explo­ration vehi­cle.

Ensuring Consistency in Mission-Critical Software

To ensure the high­est qual­i­ty of Orion’s flight soft­ware, USA required tools capa­ble of enforc­ing pro­gram­ming stan­dards, man­ag­ing con­fig­u­ra­tion process­es, and sim­pli­fy­ing the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion path. Pre­vi­ous reliance on in-house and third-party test tools cre­at­ed incon­sis­ten­cies and inef­fi­cien­cies, espe­cial­ly when qual­i­fy­ing hand-coded test har­ness­es. USA need­ed a robust, cen­tral­ized solu­tion to guar­an­tee con­sis­ten­cy and com­pli­ance across all teams.

A Unified Platform for Compliance and Verification

USA select­ed the LDRA tool suite to replace lega­cy and third-party solu­tions. By enforc­ing pro­gram­ming, apply­ing code com­plex­i­ty met­rics, and enabling rig­or­ous sta­t­ic and dynam­ic analy­sis, LDRA pro­vid­ed a uni­form plat­form for com­pli­ance and ver­i­fi­ca­tion. Most crit­i­cal­ly, LDRA’s abil­i­ty to auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ate a test har­ness elim­i­nat­ed months of effort pre­vi­ous­ly required for man­u­al develop­ment and qual­i­fi­ca­tion, ensur­ing con­sis­tent and repeat­able results across the Orion pro­gram.

Streamlined Testing, Stronger Productivity

With LDRA, USA stream­lined its test­ing and ver­i­fi­ca­tion process, shift­ing the focus from build­ing and qual­i­fy­ing test har­ness­es to ana­lyz­ing code qual­i­ty and func­tion­al­i­ty. The com­mon con­fig­u­ra­tion model enabled unit tests and regres­sions to be cre­at­ed and shared across teams with­out incon­sis­ten­cies. As a result, develop­ment pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, doc­u­men­ta­tion, and process qual­i­ty sig­nif­i­cant­ly improved, allow­ing engi­neers to spend more time on inno­va­tion and less on over­head.

“We need­ed tools capa­ble of enforc­ing pro­gram­ming stan­dards as well as man­ag­ing the con­fig­u­ra­tion process to check that we pro­duced con­sis­tent, good qual­i­ty soft­ware. LDRA offers the abil­i­ty to con­fig­ure and apply a fixed cen­tralised test model, guar­an­tee­ing that we con­sis­tent­ly test com­pli­ance to the same pro­gram­ming stan­dards and in the same exe­cu­tion envi­ron­ments.”

— Mr. Trevor Tid­well, Soft­ware Develop­ment Engi­neer, Unit­ed Space Alliance

Expanding Opportunities in Commercial Spacecraft

With the tran­si­tion toward com­mer­cial space­craft develop­ment, USA sees expand­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to lever­age the LDRA tool suite. By fur­ther automat­ing test­ing and com­pli­ance process­es, USA expects to max­i­mize the return on invest­ment from its adop­tion of LDRA tools, ensur­ing con­tin­ued suc­cess in future aero­space pro­grams.


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