Speaking at NASA

I gave a talk today at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, on the GCC coverage features I have done with them. The talk covered what prime paths and the motivation for prime path coverage, why they are an important development in dynamic analysis and how leveraging it will improve the quality of the testing we do of our systems. This marks the end of my two projects with them, MC/DC and prime path coverage, and it has truly been an incredible journey. The team at Orion have been absolutely brilliant to work with; they put trust in me when we scoped out the features and requirements, were great sparring parterns in development, and helped me test the features and gathered a lot of useful user feedback.

The teams at NASA have been using the prime path coverage support for over six months now, with good results. They have been able to accurately figure out what tests to write, found new defects, and used it as a guide to refactor code into cleaner and simpler programs. All of this work is in service of the goal of correct software and a safer spacecraft; I believe it will play an increasingly important role going forward in developing high quality and safe systems, quicker.

One day, after the flight, I will be able to look at the moon and think I was a small part of that. And that fills me with great pride and joy.