NASA’s IV&V Program named Robert Inscoe as the recipient of the 2012 IV&V Engineer of the Year award. Bob is a senior analyst on the Command and Control (C&C) IV&V team for the International Space Station (ISS) project, responsible for analysis tasks on multiple ISS CSCIs. Inscoe generated three Software Change Requests (SCRs) describing software behavior problems that were considered an outstanding example of discovering a hard-to-find real-time software behavior flaw and was followed up with a presentation of the analysis that resulted in the finding as part of the IV&V technical discussion forum.
Additionally, Bob performed interrupt processing analysis in support of IV&V’s presentation to the Avi-onics Software Control Board (ASCB) that pointed out an interrupt handling deficiency, which resulted in ISS code patches prior to transitioning to the new EPIC hardware platform. He also performed software analysis to support a “potential loss of visiting vehicle fire annunciation and fire isolation under INT MDM failure scenario,” which resulted in a change to prevent a fire hazard to the space station under a loss of ground communications during crew sleep time.
As an example of innovative thinking, Inscoe developed a software simulation that models the process of building the Integrated Communications Unit (ICU) Weighted Arbitration Table that is used by the Space-to-Ground Modem software to allocate and share band-width among the multiple Virtual Channels (VCs) supported by the ICU. The simulation has various options that control building the table, which were used to examine design decisions made by the software development team. Robert Inscoe is a leader and team player who made significant contributions to the development and enhancement of IV&V’s engineering approaches, and whose commitment to excellence is a standard for all software engineers.
