Recap of Advanced Workshop: Lean Requirements, Verification and Test-Management for Small Satellites

As part of SmallSat 2020 online event, Valispace hosted a side meeting on Aug 5.

Requirements, verification, and test-management when developing satellites is a time-consuming process, often depending on many engineers from various disciplines. Throughout the digital workshop, the Valispace team sparked conversations by sharing what they have learned from solving challenges when working with the most innovative hardware companies. Marco Witzman, CEO & Co-Founder of Valispace, and Stefan Siarov, Systems Engineer & Marketing Manager at Valispace, moderated the roundtable discussion. The most important element of this session was the discussion regarding challenges and best practices where participants engaged and learned from one another.

Round table discussion

The roundtable was an open discussion amongst all participants of the session. Siarov asked a series of questions to engage audience participation, whereas Witzmann facilitated the discussion, utilizing his experience in the industry to exemplify some of the concepts. The audience used the hand-raising feature of Zoom to ask questions or add commentary.
The responses obtained from the participants were part of the interactive round table discussion and were listed in order of highest upvotes to the least.

What are the biggest pains when it comes to managing verifications and tests?

Most upvoted responses:

  1. Requirements written are not testable or verifiable (13)
  2. Ambiguous requirements (9)
Where do you start when you’re doing verification and testing for the first time?

Most upvoted responses:

  1. Start with the requirements and develop the tests (9)
  2. Component level. Fundamentals. Bottom up (5)
  3. Get the experts. Look at similar projects (4)
What is most important for requirement breakdown?

Most upvotes responses:

  1. Understanding the rationale of the parent requirement (7)
  2. List of actionable items to go through and assign dates and personnel to (5)
  3. Understanding the functionality or usage (4)
What is most important for verification methods and their requirements?

Most upvotes responses:

  1. Be sure that the chosen verification method is adequate to verify your requirement (6)
  2. Capturing assumptions (5)
  3. Get buy-in from the customer that each method is sufficient. Understanding the initial intent for testing (4)
What is the most important for test management?

Most upvotes responses:

  1. Documentation (7 upvotes)
  2. Having a clear useful test plan/test procedures
  3. Discuss failures early

If you want to catch up on what you missed, watch the full recording here:

Throughout the session, the following resources were mentioned to get started with Requirements, verification and testing:

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