If it Isn’t Tested, it Doesn’t Work: Automated Verification of SOFIA Data Handling Software
Garrett Walter Holthaus, B. A. Stroozas, Zaheer Abbas Ali · DigitalCommons - CalPoly (California State Polytechnic University) · 2013
This project involves writing code to automate the verification testing of the Data Handling Working Group (DHWG) software tools for the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). The DHWG tools extract engineering data from SOFIA missions. Engineering data includes a variety of information on the operations and status of SOFIA systems during a flight, including computer network traffic, user commands, and images acquired from cameras mounted on the telescope assembly. It is important to review engineering data because this data can lead to the discovery of any problems or inefficiencies in SOFIA hardware and software. Analysis of engineering data can also help improve overall system performance, enable long-term trend analysis of system effectiveness, and aid in anomaly investigations. Many different analysts run the DHWG tools, both during and after SOFIA missions. Verification and testing of the DHWG tools ensures that they are properly implemented and that they operate correctly. By automating the test procedures, tool verification is greatly simplified, and this helps facilitate rapid deployment of tool updates to users. The outcome of this project will be a set of Perl scripts that automatically carry out the verification test procedures for the DHWG tools.