Establishing and maintaining traceability between large aerospace process standards

Abstract

The aerospace domain is known for its emphasis on product quality, since hardware or software failures may have potentially catastrophic consequences. Therefore, numerous standards govern space software development. In this paper, we present an approach for systematically establishing and maintaining traceability between software development standards. It augments the standards' word processing files with additional meta-information, thereby making them accessible and understandable for programs, so that a database can be used for advanced analyses. Additionally, we present experience collected during application of the approach at the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).