Case Study: Astrium boosts space software reliability with QA Systems AdaTEST 95

Astrium - Customer Case Study

The customer, Astrium, faced the paramount challenge of developing highly reliable onboard software for two distinct space missions: the RADARSAT-2 satellite and the Beagle 2 Mars lander. For RADARSAT-2, the requirement was driven by the need for high availability, while for Beagle 2, extreme weight constraints meant the software had to work perfectly with virtually no fallback options. The vendor, QA Systems, provided its AdaTEST 95 unit testing tool to help address these stringent reliability demands.

QA Systems implemented its AdaTEST 95 solution, which was quickly adopted by Astrium's development teams and was productive from the very first day. For the Beagle 2 project, the vendor promptly developed a new capability to allow for coverage testing on the target hardware, which was crucial due to the compiler's Ravenscar profile restrictions. The results were a highly reliable testing process that gave the developers confidence in their code and provided customers with dependable results data, all achieved without impacting the project's limited budget.

Astrium

Bill Edwards

Software Manager