Summary: Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO obtained information on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) efforts to improve shuttle software oversight activities and identified: (1) NASA procedures for developing, validating, verifying, and reconfiguring shuttle software; (2) an independent NASA contractor's recommendations for verification and validation (V&V) of shuttle software; (3) NASA progress in implementing the recommendations; and (4) NASA resolution of the National Research Council's (NRC) and the shuttle program's software steering group's concerns about the V&V process.
GAO found that NASA: (1) agreed to respond to NRC and congressional concerns about independent V&V for shuttle software development, but had not yet committed to it and had moved slowly in establishing V&V policies and documenting existing V&V practices; (2) expanded its V&V contract with an independent contractor, but implemented only 6 of the contractor's 219 recommendations; (3) planned to phase out the contract in 1991 because it believed that the contractor's recommendations added little value and the contractor identified either insignificant problems or problems NASA would have identified through its own quality assurance process; (4) addressed some V&V issues raised by the shuttle software steering group, but felt that the program already had sufficient oversight and independence; and (5) contended that current software V&V practices provided adequate independence between software developers and acquirers.
