Design Review Improvement Recommendations

Abstract

The aerospace industry continues to experience design escapes that significantly impact program execution and mission operations in spite of significant advances in design and analysis tool capabilities and robust command media governing the product development and design review process. This report presents the findings and recommendations from an MAIW industry team's evaluation of 170 design escape anomalies that were detected during either factory testing or on-orbit test and operations. This analysis shows that a majority of these defects should have been detected and resolved earlier in the product development lifecycle. The primary factors contributing to these design review escapes have been shown to be: 1) Failure to staff design review teams with individuals having the necessary domain expertise (60%); 2) Failure to identify deficiencies in completed design analysis (30%); and 3) Failure to perform development testing using an Engineering Model (EM) to validate the design and supporting analysis (43%). This report includes the team's recommendations. This report also includes recommendations provided by the industry team members to address additional issues identified in the supporting analysis, such as those associated with effectively reviewing integrated mixed technology products. While these recommendations are targeted at Class A and B National Asset space programs, many of these recommendations can be implemented with little or no recurring costs and should be considered for all space programs to reduce the risk of a design escape going undetected and irreversibly impacting mission operations. This report does not address the Software Development Review Process given the uniqueness of the CMMI Process. The Software Development Process is extensively covered in TR-RS-2015-00012. Hardware/software interactions are an important part of any design development and that care needs to be taken to ensure the minimization of these adverse interactions.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 18, 2015
Accession Number
ADA627620

Entities

People

  • Richard K. Covington

Organizations

  • The Aerospace Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics
  • Human Systems
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Best Practices
  • Case Studies
  • Contracts
  • Electronics
  • Engineering
  • Environment
  • Failure Mode And Effect Analysis
  • Lessons Learned
  • Manufacturing
  • National Security
  • Performance Tests
  • Reliability
  • Software Development
  • Spacecraft
  • Systems Engineering
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Test Equipment

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Applied Combinatorial Optimization and Logic Circuit Design.
  • Organizational Process Management (OPM).
  • Software Engineering

Technology Areas

  • Space