PINTS Software Practices Jarett Hailes July 22, 2003

Acknowledgements Practices have been developed in conjunction with: –Surrey Kim –David Ballantyne –Calvin Chan –Jonathan Wiersma –Jesse McCrosky –Nikki Hu –Liam Stewart –Mike Kouritzin

Outline Background Objectives Practices –Organization –Standards –Testing & Review –Software Design Framework

Background Before: –One off project development –Little coding standards –Limited independent testing –Management burden

Background Cont. Early initiatives: –Determine common interfaces –Provide group collaboration –Discussed standard way of presenting data/code

Background Cont. We found: –Bottom-up approach didn’t catch everything –Common code helped speed development –Needed to build more consistent structure usage –Haven’t made independent testing a reality

Objectives Reorganize PINTS to distribute leadership and maximize productivity Finish developing management reporting, and coding standards Establish and execute trial run of testing and code review Develop versatile framework for all projects

Organization Project Leader Project Manager Project Head … Project Members

Standards Project Standards –Outline –Informal updates –Project Reports Coding Standards –Style & Substance Documentation Standards –Recording all relevant information

Testing Independent, black box testing Based on code documentation in interfaces Deterministic versus random components

Code Review Process: 1.Prior to meeting, main author sends out code to reviewers 2.Reviewers look over code for: a)Correctness b)Coding style standards c)Clarity/relevance of comments

Review Contd. 3.Meeting: a)Tester presents black box results b)Reviewers provide feedback on code c)Suggest/Require changes 4.Post-Meeting: a)Alter code as necessary b)Follow-up with subset of reviewers

Framework Outline Requirements Interface Directions

Requirements Easy to assimilate (new users) ‘Plug and Play’ filters/problems Provide distributable computing interface Ability to build language around framework Make filter code more versatile

Interface Basic Object Hierarchy Signal / Observation Models Filter breakdown –Modules –Filter interface Executables

Basic Objects

Signal / Observations

Modules

Filter

Executables

Putting it Together Example: ProjectManager::buildEnvironments() { numFilters = parameterFile.getFilterCount(); for (i=0; i<numFilters; i++) { parameterFile.getFilterVariables (i, vars); switch(vars.filterType) { case SERP: this->buildSERPEnvironment(vars); … }

Example Contd. ProjectManager::run() { for (int i=0; i<numFilters; i++) { for(int j=0; j<moduleCount[i]; j++) executeModule(filters[i], moduleOrder[i][j]); }

Directions Complete interface standardization Realize helper classes (updater, visualizer, etc.) Implement on all combinations for: –2 Signal/Observation pairs –2 Filters: Particle & (REST or IDEX)