Autonomy Requirements Tester (ART): Assisting Clear Communications among Stakeholders

Abstract

Autonomy Requirements Tester (ART) is a software tool designed and prototyped in a NASA Phase I Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) project to address the difficulties of testing autonomy requirements. It supports clear communications among engineers with different by translating requirements terms into software behavioral expectations, which can be used to drive test specifications and the reporting of test results. Also, because it helps translate the requirements into software behavior terms, it addresses some of the difficulties of testing autonomy requirements. Innovations in ART include a clear linking of requirements, expected software behavior, test plans, and test results. They also include the immersion of the Test Runner portion of the ART design within the Core Flight System (cFS) architecture, so that the application under test can be tested as it is intended to fly, even before the remainder of the flight software has been developed. ART also includes a reusable test specification for regression testing and employs a test plan template to ease the specification of multiple, detailed test plans for similarly formatted autonomy requirements.