Software quality assurance (SQA) is an integral component of ORNL analysis software development practices. ORNL has specific expertise in the application of international consensus standards such as ISO-9001-2008, American Society of Mechanical Engineers [ASME] NQA-1, DOE orders (DOE 414.1D), and NRC guidelines (NUREG/BR-0167) to nuclear system analysis software. ORNL maintains the Standards-Based Management System, which documents quality assurance activities and SQA plans and activities which are reviewed regularly by established ORNL SQA boards.
The success of any ongoing software project requires routine compilation and testing of software and data, along with continual support for the latest hardware and compilers. Major development projects maintain dedicated hardware with appropriate testing infrastructure to keep up with the pace of development and maintain a production release schedule.
Continuous integration hardware is available to fulfill SQA for a large team on multiple platforms with different compilers and configurations. Continuous deployment for Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems enables timely production releases and immediate collaboration on newly developed features not yet officially released.
ORNL has broad expertise in solution verification, including the evaluation of discretization uncertainty and numerical solver convergence, for radiation transport, thermal hydraulics, structural mechanics, fuel/material
performance, plasma physics, and radiation activation/depletion analysis. ORNL also has specific expertise in uncertainty quantification, which is the propagation of input uncertainties through the simulation or model, using a variety of direct and indirect assessment methods. ORNL develops a variety of custom software tools to automate and support these functions and partners with external teams to develop others.
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