SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT FOR LARGE SCALE AVIONIC INTEGRATION PROGRAMS

Good management and control of software development is a necessity in today’s digital avionic environment. The last 20 years have seen a major trend away from the analog systems of the 1950s to the digital avionics of the 1980s. This trend encompasses not only the extensive computer systems found on almost all modern airplanes and helicopters, but also every newly developed black box is designed around a microprocessor and uses digital firmware. Laboratory facilities needed to validate the performance of these systems and their black boxes have also undergone a digital transformation with significant focus on the ability to simulate hardware before the hardware is delivered. This paper describes the structured approach that IBM uses to manage and control software development on large scale avionic programs. The paper also describes the software specification process, system validation techniques, and test facilities used by IBM Federal Systems (FS) since these are so closely related to the software development.