Keith's 23 Dec note: IV&V had an unexpected visit from NASA's Chief of Safety and Mission Assurance Officer Bryan O'Connor today. He relieved Butch Caffall immediately of his duties as Facility Director of NASA IV&V and re-assigned him to NASA HQ "to work some technical issues for NASA starting early in January" according to an internal memo. Greg Blaney is acting IV&V Program Manager and IV&V Facility Director. IV&V employees had been expecting something to happen but this action was more abrupt and sudden than had been expected.
According to a NASA IV&V engineer: "The immediate re-assignment of the NASA IV&V director represents the end of modeling of NASA projects as part of our IV&V analysis. We have endured four years of spending IV&V funds on, what has been from the onset, an R&D effort to create a new method of doing IV&V using an independently built system reference model (UML based) of a space vehicle design based on Project artifacts. Its been costly in dollars and in performance. This R&D has taken countless man-hours away from our directive to find issues/problems with S/C FSW development."