Agile Mission Operations in the CubeSat Project MOVE-II

Abstract

With the continuous advancements in commercial off-the-shelf small satellite technology, there has been a significant increase in proposed missions and an ongoing trend towards rapid development and launch. Traditionally, mission operations of larger spacecraft utilize established products, adapting the operational interfaces and software to the needs of the specific mission. This paper reports the creation of the mission operations interface for a CubeSat mission from scratch to a fully operational system in about seven months under the voluntary commitment of about six students. We will first give a short introduction into the traditional software development used extensively in the space sector before we briefly describe CubeSats and our own CubeSat project, called MOVE-II. The used software development process will be described using the agile methodology Scrum as a baseline. It will be explained how this process was implemented utilizing tools like Trello, GitLab and Slack. Afterward the software design, as well as used frameworks and software, are briefly described to demonstrate how these go hand in hand with our development process. Subsequently, our operations software, as well as satellite operations with our software, are described with a focus on advantages and disadvantages of our software development approach and general lessons learned that we gathered during our project.

People Factors Influencing Project Success in Software Development: A Survey of Agile Development Teams in Indonesia

“…According to [31] in [19] ASD depends on each iterative stage, where the stages of requirements analysis, design, development, and product testing are carried out in the iteration. The development of agile teams is a very important factor, it is because individuals have the freedom and responsibility in development.…”

“…Frequent changes to the requirements that have been determined, it is necessary to have good collaboration with the customer so that the adjustment process can be carried out as quickly as possible. This is done so that the resulting product can be what the customer wants [19] [27]. Therefore, the product owner or customer in the agile method always gets information on product developments in the iteration [17].…”