Research activities pertaining to perceived shortcomings in SR&QA practice on aeronautical, facility, and space projects

摘要

Research was prompted by what were perceived to be shortcomings in SR&QA practice on aeronautical, facility, and space projects not only at Ames but elsewhere in government and industry. Foremost, SR&QA resources were (accurately) seen at that time to be dwindling. The luxury of having a cadre of safety analysts, reliability experts, and quality assurance specialists available to work with an SR&QA analyst on a given project was fast disappearing. It would therefore be necessary to cut deeply into the fat and integrate the combined talents of these individuals into a single unified activity which could be performed by a single analyst - yet provide the same quality level of safety and mission risk assessment. Complicating the effect of diminishing resources and a pressing need to 'do more for less' was the fact that systems were being built with new implementation technologies notably in digital control, data communications, and software - technologies lying well beyond SR&QA experience of Ames at the time. It would be necessary to find highly efficient methods for assessing these new complex technologies and integrating these methods into the new single activity. As elsewhere, SR&QA assessment efforts and recommendations tended to appear quite late in the design cycle where changed based on the recommendations bore high cost. To optimize cost effectiveness of risk assessment it became imperative that the new activity should not only be done early in the design cycle but that it should drive, and not simply chronicle, system design. Finally, it was believed that quantitative measures of reliability and safety should be incorporated, where needed, to guide risk decision making.