NASA Software Safety Guidebook [pdf]

standards.nasa.gov

53 points·weatherlight··5 comments

This document is delightfully (?) 90s-era MS Office coded, with plenty of clip art and word art. Somewhat funny to see.

For a rather dense document from 2004, is any of this worth casual study and still relevant?

Page 384/385, "H.14 Good Programming Practices Checklist" seems interesting

I love that they used a clipart wizard hat as the *official* symbol of software development on page 14.

It's not bad at all, though the organization is a bit funny. I get the impression of an organization that knows a great deal struggling to get it all down on paper. Specific references to programming languages, tools, RTOS choices, etc are obviously dated, and specifics of NASA's processes in 2004 won't necessarily apply to whatever you're doing. Their best practices checklists for different programming languages were not exhaustive at the time, and are written like suggestions - I would supplement with more recent approaches there too.

That said, methods of safety analysis have not changed much, and neither has what-makes-an-RTOS-an-RTOS, for example.

I've had a print copy of this document on my shelf for a couple of years. I use it as a reference about a dozen times per year.

The NASA Software Engineering Handbook [1] is also full of interesting stuff. Unfortunately it's all in an incredibly slow Confluence wiki.

[1]https://swehb.nasa.gov

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