Teaching Aerospace Software Quality at an Undergrad Level in the Pandemic – Experiences

Abstract

This paper describes the experiences of teaching software quality as an undergraduate course. The subject was offered at National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal and the course covered the aerospace standards, safety, software requirements, design, reviews, and testing. Teaching the ARP 4761, ARP 4754, DO 178C and DO 331 to the students was enlightening. The course was completely conducted online on Teams and Moodle and this itself brings out many insights of teaching an industry level training as an undergraduate course. The course covered the basic of these standards and went through a safety analysis process using the System Theoretic Process Analysis. The problem statement was an onboard scanner. This mimicked a radar system but was called a scanner and had a set of functionalities that was simple enough to understand at an undergrad level. A detailed set of requirements was developed during the course. The process of requirement review was done on the requirements to merge the workflow and process defined in the standards with a practical example. The design model and code were developed for the problem statement. This also went through a review process. A formal method approach was used to test the modes of the scanner. Finally, a set of random tests were developed with a set of Orthogonal Array tests to test the system. The use of a problem helped the students to better interact and understand the complexity. The paper describes the curriculum and presents the work done by the students and their experiences during the course.