The ESA software engineering standards: past, present and future

The European Space Agency (ESA) has had a set of software engineering standards which have been in force since 1984 and have undergone two revisions since that time. These standards were written by a group called the Board for Software Standardisation and Control (BSSC). This paper describes the role of the BSSC and gives a brief outline of the ESA software engineering standards (PSS-05-0), including recent work on a version of the standards for use in small projects, the so-called PSS-05 "lite". The results of work on the comparison of the ESA software engineering standards with software-related ISO standards such as ISO 9001/9000-3 and ISO 12207 are summarised. Work in progress is discussed, notably the production of a guide to applying PSS-05-0 in projects using object-oriented methods and coding standards for a number of programming languages. The outlook for the future is discussed. This discussion includes new standards coming from the European Cooperation for Space Standardisation (ECSS) as well as covering some other topical issues.