I worked for that organization from 1996-2005. Nothing earth-shattering:
- Requirements Reviews with Customer, Requirements Analysts, and Testers all sitting around the same table going over them word by word. (e.g. 12 people to review changing an interface by one parameter so that a new value can be displayed in the cockpit.)
- Code reviews with 8 people around the table going over the changes line by line.
- Independent organizations performing unit tests and system tests on the software. Again, with 10 people around the table going over your test results line by line, plot by plot.
Those code reviews are more commonly called inspections or code walkthroughs and are very very uncommon. Everyone wants to cheap out on testing and quality :/
It's process and people and organization. I mean the sense of mission at NASA appears to be pretty high and substantially common. The processes are just normal engineering. Most software these days is not developed with normal engineering processes. I mean a person can go to a Rails Bootcamp for twelve weeks and be hired as a software engineer. In two years they can become a senior software engineer.
In an engineering culture, a person goes to university for five years and gets out, takes a rigorous test and then works as an Engineer in Training for several years. After a few years of formally structured work experience, the person takes another rigorous test and if and only if the person passes that test they actually are allowed to become an engineer. Maybe a decade after that, they'll have a plausible claim to being a senior engineer.
NASA isn't a typical engineering culture. A lot of engineers have masters and doctorate's on top of normal bachelor's level knowledge.
