ECSS Delivery Review Board (space-systems/ecss/q20-drb)

Use when the task is the clause 5.7.3 delivery review of ECSS-Q-ST-20C: a finished item is ready to leave the supplier, a board has to convene on it, and the question is whether it may be delivered, with what reservations, and what the board record has to say afterwards.

Domain quick reference

• The board is the last point at which the delivery can be stopped by the organisation that built the item. After it, the item is the customer's problem, so the board's authority comes from who sits on it: quality assurance, project management, engineering, configuration management and the customer's representative each hold a veto the others cannot exercise.
• The quality seat is only a check if it is independent of the organisation that built the item. A quality member reporting into production can attend a board and still not be able to stop it.
• The board reviews a fixed input set, not a narrative: the end-item data package, the open nonconformance log, and the deviations and waivers offered against the delivery. A document said to be following on has not arrived.
• A disposition is per finding. A major nonconformance carried on use-as-is or repair leaves the deviation inside the delivered item, so it needs the customer's agreement; a rework or scrap disposition removes it and needs only the closure evidence.
• A waiver that was never approved, or that lapsed before the delivery date, is not a reservation on the delivery — it is the absence of one.
• The record is a deliverable in its own right. Date, chair, attendance, the inputs reviewed, the decision and the actions are what makes the decision defensible when the item is opened months later.

Workflow

1. Validate the roster: normalise each function name, refuse the same function seated twice, and separate a function nobody holds from one whose holder did not attend.
2. Compute the quorum ratio over the required functions and compare it with the required value through a named tolerance, so a ratio landing a few ULPs short of unity is not read as a short board.
3. Raise a dependent quality seat as its own finding rather than folding it into attendance.
4. Reconcile the data package presented with the one the delivery owes, matching document names without regard to case or separator, and name each gap.
5. Take each open nonconformance to a disposition, grouping the result as blocking or as a reservation the delivery carries.
6. Take each deviation and waiver to its approval and validity state on the delivery date, and raise an unapproved or lapsed one as blocking.
7. Check the minute fields, then combine everything: any blocking finding is a hold, reservations alone are a delivery with reservation, neither is a clean delivery.

Pitfalls

• Treating a quorum as a headcount. Five people in the room is not five functions represented, and the function nobody holds is the one whose objection never gets made.
• Reading a reservation as a hold. An approved, in-date waiver is exactly the mechanism that lets a known deviation be delivered; refusing it makes the board a rubber stamp in the other direction.
• Accepting a major use-as-is on the supplier's signature alone. Use-as-is and repair both leave the deviation in the hardware, and only the customer can agree to receive it.
• Stopping at the first blocking finding. The board convenes once, so the record has to carry every gap found in that sitting, not the first one.
• Leaving the minutes for later. An undated record with no attendance cannot show which functions agreed, and the decision becomes unreconstructable.

Behavior contract (gate 3)

The roster validation, quorum ratio, independence and attendance findings, data package reconciliation, nonconformance and waiver dispositions, minute-field check and the combined delivery decision are exercised by the gate 3 contract test: scripts/test_q20_drb.py against scripts/q20_drb_logic.py (stdlib unittest, offline). Run: python3 scripts/test_q20_drb.py

Compliance

• ECSS standards are freely downloadable (ESA); cite the source and paraphrase per standards-map.yaml.
• compliance: STANDARDS-REF, gated: false.