Benchmarking software requirements documentation for space application

Abstract

Poorly written requirements are a common source of software defects. In application areas like space systems, the cost of malfunctioning software can be very high. This way, assessing the quality of software requirements before coding is of utmost importance. This work proposes a systematic procedure for assessing software requirements for space systems that adopt the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) standards. The main goal is to provide a low-cost, easy-to-use benchmarking procedure that can be applied during the software requirements review to guarantee that the requirements specifications comply with the ECSS standards. The benchmark includes two checklists that are composed by a set of questions to be applied to the requirements specification. It was applied to the software requirements specification for one of the services described in the ECSS Packet Utilization Standard (PUS). Results show that the proposed benchmark allows finding more with a low effort. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.