NASA pushes software frontier
- By Paula Shaki Trimble
- May 22, 2000
The first signs that NASA needed to improve its software engineering were
apparent more than a year ago, before the failures of two Mars-bound missions.
But the software and management problems that contributed to the losses
of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander in late 1999 convinced
NASA's chief information officer that it was time to make changes.
Lee Holcomb, who heads the office at NASA's headquarters that is in
charge of the space agency's information technology investments and policy,
last month briefed senior managers on a plan to improve NASA's software
development and management. Although the loss of the two Mars spacecraft
highlighted software engineering shortfalls, Holcomb stressed that the need
for better software is a national problem.
Holcomb hopes to raise the bar for NASA's internally developed software
with a four-part plan (see box). The plan will be implemented quickly and
aggressively, and a business plan will be delivered to Congress June 1.
"Research could do a lot to provide tools to improve the productivity
of building software," Holcomb said. "We face the same problem everyone
faces — the need for talent."
NASA also plans to incorporate the Capability Maturity Model into its
software strategy, Holcomb said. The CMM, developed
by the federally funded Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon
University, has become a staple at many agencies as a way to assess an organization's
overall software engineering practices, with a focus on establishing documented,
repeatable processes that carry over from program to program.
Its proponents include the Defense Department, the Federal Aviation
Administration, and more recently, the Internal Revenue Service, the Immigration
and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The CMM sets out five levels of "maturity," based on the extent to which
those engineering practices are in place and documented. Level 1 indicates
an ad hoc environment, which means software quality could vary widely from
project to project, while Level 5 represents a highly structured environment.
Most organizations aim for Level 2 or 3.
The CMM has achieved more credibility as larger organizations attribute
their internal improvement to it, said Bill Peterson, director of software
engineering at SEI. "It's impossible to test [for] quality and fix the defects
late in development," he said. "If you find it at that point, you might
as well do it again. The idea is to move it up front into the requirements
and design."
NASA will have technical guidelines and procedures for software development
in about two months, Holcomb said. In that same time period, the agency
will use a more vigorous independent verification and validation program,
bringing in experts to make sure that software projects perform as expected.
As a result, a program's schedule might slip, he said. "Part of this
software initiative is just doing business the way it's supposed to be done,"
he said.
NASA will train its work force to manage software development, and software
vendors will be expected to achieve CMM Level 3 or higher.
Computer Sciences Corp.'s NASA programs unit achieved software CMM Level
5 in November 1998. By using a combination of international standards and
the CMM benchmarks, CSC was able to involve its whole NASA organization
in improving productivity and return on investment, said Jerry Page, a vice
president in CSC's NASA programs unit.
The goal of CMM is not the benchmarks but improving the product and
its productivity, Page said. "You could have a process that is slick and
still have junk coming out of it," he said.