Developments in Aerospace Software Engineering practices for VSEs: An overview of the process requirements and practicesof integrated Maturity models and Standards

Abstract

As part of the evolution of the Space market in the last years – globally referred to as Space 2.0 - small companies are playing an increasingly relevant role in different aerospace projects. Business incubators established by European Space Agency (ESA) and similar entities are evidence of the need of moving initiatives to small companies characterized by greater flexibility to develop specific activities. Software is a key component in most aerospace projects, and the success of the initiatives and projects usually depends on the capability of developing reliable software following well-defined standards. But small entities face some difficulties when adopting software development standards that have been conceived thinking on larger organizations and big programs. The need of defining software development standards tailored to small companies and groups is a permanent subject of discussion not only in the aerospace field, and has led in recent years to the publication of the ISO/IEC 29110 series of systems and software engineering standards and guides, aimed to solve the issues that Very Small Entities (VSEs) () – settings having up to twenty-five people -, found with other standards like CMMI or SPICE. This paper discusses the tailoring defined by different aerospace organizations for VSEs in the aerospace industry, and presents a conceptual arrangement of the standard based on meta-modeling languages that allow the extension and full customization with the incorporation of specific software engineering requirements and practices from ECSS (European Cooperation for Space Standardization).