Abstract
As modern weapon systems have evolved into embedded software systems, the capability to develop, install, and maintain high-quality software products is becoming increasingly valuable in today's competitive aerospace and defense industry. It is desirable, especially for government-contracted projects whose end-users are military personnel, that specific types of software quality elements are assured early during product development; namely, functionality and usability. Motivated by this need to approach improving software quality from a user's perspective, this paper presents a case study that analyzes system-level software integration testing results for a weapon system indigenously developed in the Republic of Korea. Quantitative data, such as software defect ratios and configuration change rates, are computed to observe meaningful trends with respect to functionality - represented by tests designed to verify the system's electrical signal interfaces - and usability, which is evaluated in terms of how often the initial human-computer interface had to be re-designed. Insights gained from these exercises are subsequently presented as a set of "lessons learned" to take into account when developing new software items for complex weapon systems.