NASA Quality Assurance in an MBSE World

Over the past decade or so, improvements and changes in descriptive models of systems have been occurring. This has mainly come about in the shift from a document-centered approach to an approach using a dedicated language known as the Systems Modeling Language (SysML). SysML has allowed Systems Engineers (SEs) to consolidate information about a system and even automate some tasks leaving the SEs to concentrate on the actual engineering and decision-making. Many of our quality assurance (QA) tasks either overlap or interface with systems engineering tasks, thus, it is important for quality engineers to understand and contribute to these system engineering models. We will explore some of the ways in which QA processes and products may be model within the framework of SysML. First let us look at how quality can be assured by using requirement elements in a systems model.