Ongoing requirements discovery in high-integrity systems

Discovering new requirements and requirements knowledge continues throughout the lifetime of many high-integrity embedded systems. Understanding the mechanisms for how we discover and resolve requirements identifies guidelines to help prevent anomalies found during testing from recurring during operations. We can improve our systems´ quality by means of a better understanding of the mechanisms by which we discover requirements and manage them in testing and operations. We analyzed anomaly reports from testing and operations for eight spacecraft projects at the California Institute of Technology´s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, showing that many of the anomalies during these phases involve software requirements discovery. As a result, several patterns of requirements discovery emerged. In turn, identifying these patterns leads to six guidelines for managing the ongoing requirements discovery.