A systematic approach to the Planck LFI end-to-end test and its
  application to the DPC Level 1 pipeline
  The Level 1 of the Planck LFI Data Processing Centre (DPC) is devoted to the
handling of the scientific and housekeeping telemetry. It is a critical
component of the Planck ground segment which has to strictly commit to the
project schedule to be ready for the launch and flight operations. In order to
guarantee the quality necessary to achieve the objectives of the Planck
mission, the design and development of the Level 1 software has followed the
ESA Software Engineering Standards. A fundamental step in the software life
cycle is the Verification and Validation of the software. The purpose of this
work is to show an example of procedures, test development and analysis
successfully applied to a key software project of an ESA mission. We present
the end-to-end validation tests performed on the Level 1 of the LFI-DPC, by
detailing the methods used and the results obtained. Different approaches have
been used to test the scientific and housekeeping data processing. Scientific
data processing has been tested by injecting signals with known properties
directly into the acquisition electronics, in order to generate a test dataset
of real telemetry data and reproduce as much as possible nominal conditions.
For the HK telemetry processing, validation software have been developed to
inject known parameter values into a set of real housekeeping packets and
perform a comparison with the corresponding timelines generated by the Level 1.
With the proposed validation and verification procedure, where the on-board and
ground processing are viewed as a single pipeline, we demonstrated that the
scientific and housekeeping processing of the Planck-LFI raw data is correct
and meets the project requirements.
