I'm back and blogging again. I have a poster presentation for a workshop in September the official title being - Managing IV&V Analysis of Products of an Agile Development Processes. The main idea is to examine the way information is processed using fluid dynamics as an analogy. Here is the abstract I submitted originally:
The NASA Independent Validation and Verification team addressed and overcame several challenges when examining the flight software for the mission involving highly volatile and dynamic flows of information. The team’s adaptation of traditional work process presents an opportunity to examine the team’s analysis practices as a case study in management information systems. The study will focus on the analysis of a space flight project’s fault protection implementation. The target system is a rover that will fly to Mars, land and perform a two year science mission with 10 instruments. This mission, due to its high level of autonomy, has one of the most complex fault protection systems ever developed by NASA.
Despite the non-material nature of information, some examination of information flow using analytical models from other disciplines may be used to enlighten the understanding of these challenges and how principles from these models have or could have been applied to handle the changing environment. In particular, examples from finance and fluid dynamics can be used as analogous parallels to the management issues arising from the cyclical process. In finance, the Black-Scholes options pricing model is used to understand the problems associated with volatility and time compression.
The behavior of fluid streams in a compressed environment, such as a funnel, is similar to how information is processed in the validation and verification process. How the IV&V team’s management used eddy effects in the information flow to enhance the value of the analysis will be a focus of the study.