Statement on TRR

by Joar Brynnel on 2023-07-10

On July 3 and 4, the 4MOST Test Readiness Review (TRR) was held in Potsdam between ESO and the 4MOST Project Office. This review is an official major project milestone that manifests the transition from the system integration phase to the system verification phase. In broad strokes, the scope of the TRR is to verify that the hardware is available and working, and that documentation is complete before launching formal verification.

Not unexpectedly, the weeks leading up to the TRR were extremely busy. The effort that was put in by the 4MOST team was nothing short of amazing. Hardware was installed and tested, minor hardware issues were corrected, formal action items were addressed, documentation was updated and released. The sum of all these activities brought 4MOST a huge step forward towards completion.

On the second day of the TRR review, the ESO chair of the 4MOST PAE process summarized the findings and recommendations. Without going into too much detail, ESO was very impressed by the status of the HW in the integration hall. On subsystem level, the readiness was found to be adequate. There were however parts of the system level documentation that needs update and more detail to allow for an efficient execution of the verification activities. The PAE chair believed that the project will benefit from developing these documents further before proceeding with verification, and the decision was to postpone the TRR.

What is happening now is that some already scheduled verification activities will nevertheless proceed as planned. In parallel, the Project Office has made some internal priority changes with the goal of finishing the missing documentation as soon as possible. This includes a re-planning effort that will require some time to sort out before we can provide a new project schedule. We hope that we are able to finish this activity and present an updated project schedule in the next coming weeks. The PO believes that the overall delay triggered by the postponed TRR milestone will be quite moderate. Stay tuned!