The Mars Science Laboratory Entry, Descent, and Landing systems engineering team was presented with many challenges in its verification and validation campaign. These challenges arose from both the general complexity of the system architecture and the schedule and resource limitations of the test program. As a result, the team had to accommodate a complex set of requirements, test venues, test objectives, and analysis products. Discussed within are logistical problems faced by the team related to managing these complexities in a portion of Entry, Descent, and Landing verification and validation scope known as the flight system domain. The flight system domain encompassed software-software interactions and system-level software-hardware interactions that happened during the Entry, Descent, and Landing phase of the mission and necessitated the use of flight software and/or flight-equivalent hardware for final verification. The following application-specific solutions were developed to mitigate the complexity-driven problems: methods for functional and priority categorization of verification items (requirements); use of the commercial JIRA software bug-tracking tool for verification item management and closure tracking; development of an automated, configuration-controlled test execution framework; and development of tools for semiautomated test analysis and report management. A list of lessons learned was also developed. Both the solutions and lessons learned can be generalized to other space missions and formidable systems engineering problems, especially those with similar resource-limited constraints.
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