1. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGO F. Carbognani for The Virgo Collaboration iCALEPCS - Geneva 10-14 October, 2005

2. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 2 Virgo Project Suspended Michelson Interferometer with two 3 Km arms aimed at the detection of gravitational wave signals from cosmic sources

3. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 3 Project Numbers 700933 Lines of Code (LOC) of C/C++ and Assembler Supported external packages amount of 371339 LOC of C/C++ 50 Workstation + 60 Local Control Units (RIOs) for the Interferometer operation 4 operating systems (OS9, alpha/OSF1, Linux, LynxOs 2 countries, 6 laboratories, 18 teams, almost 100 developers over the current lifespan of the project.

4. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 4 Size

5. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 5 Main Ideas Scientific software projects like VIRGO are becoming too large and complex to be managed without proper SE procedures Heavy-weight procesess and standards, like CMM, IEEE or ISO 9000 somethime limit their existence to office cupboards. Standards need to be simple and implemented by embedding them as a set of consistent tools

6. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 6 Key Areas Configuration Management Problem Report Development Environment Documentation (Automatic) Testing Releases Performance Monitoring

7. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 7 Configuration Management The supporting tool (SCVS) is a very thin layer on top of CVS aimed to simplify its use and tailor it on the Virgo Software development specificity. The basic rules behind SCVS are: –All files belonging to a package are handled at the same time –Only one person at time can modify a package –Branches are supported In archiving a package, the developer tells the others that a new CONSISTENT set of files is ready for use.

8. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 8 Software Archive Access and Size

9. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 9 Software Problem Report (SPR) Provides an easy standard avenue for users and testers to report bugs and for developers and maintainers to fix them and track them in an orderly fashion. Very simple interface and SPRs lifecycle to avoid that developers end up in spending more time on the bug tracking system than on the bugs or the projects themselves. A central database with Web and email interface to submit, query, modify SPRs (implemented using WREQ)

10. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 10 SPR Statistics VCS-3.0

11. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 11 Development Environment A standardized development essential requirement to manage different people in different sites. Such standardized environment has been obtained using the tool CMT CMT provides all key elements of a development environment: –structured make usage –easy encapsulation of third party tools and libraries –standardization of the UNIX environment set-up of every Virgo user.

12. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 12 Documentation Document Templates Whenever possible extract documentation from the code itself for maintainability Doxygen support –CMT fragments for the generation of the Doxygen documents via “make” –Doxyfile template.

13. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 13 Testing Has to be automatic Tool for Automated Testing(tat) has been adopted and slightly modified for the Virgo software Key feature of tat are: –The test execution has a standard and very simple interface (just a single command) –The test command prepares the environment set-up, executes the test(s), filters out variant data (dates, time, host names), compares results against reference and provides FAILED or PASSED result.

14. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 14 Testing (cont.) Virgo Test Facility (VTF) Model of control system and control room Validation of Software Releases Validation of Operating Systems baselines Integration tests for subsystems Implements a full Suspension Crate replica and minimal DAQ chain. Being continuously upgraded and expanded

15. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 15 Releases Slow upgrade cycle (3-6 months) for Major (External) Releases, on demand for Minor (Internal) Releases Tested for non-regression Uniquely identify all components (O.S., tools, external packages, Common Software) needed as development or operational platform of an application. Provide the explicit Integration Plan Heavily relying on the Virgo Test Facility (VTF) for the build and test phase Latest releases represent a true fully aligned baseline

16. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 16 VCS-1.0 Use Dependency

17. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 17 VCS-3.0 Use Dependency

18. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 18 System Monitoring The Software Release cycle must be completed by collecting field data to be carefully analyzed for succeeding releases. The normal scope of the Big Brother tool (monitoring System and Network-delivered services) has been extended by proposing and customizing it as a common framework for all Virgo Subsystems performances monitoring BB graphs very effective in spotting specific software problems.

19. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 19 System Monitoring (cont.)

20. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 Support for the Object Oriented development approach: –New templates for Analysis and Design Documents –UML and Use Cases: Evaluation of the umbrello graphical tool –C++ Class templates (hpp and cpp files) containing the Doxygen tags Web based documentation and teamwork support: –Automatic generation of User Manuals in HTML format via Doxygen –Use of the Wiki tool as the main project development space, document management system and knowledge base. Integrated Development Environment (IDE) –KDevelop being customized for fully automated Doxygen documentation generation and for CMT integration 20 Future Steps

21. F. Carbognani Software Engineering for the Virgo Project at EGOGeneva-iCALEPCS 14/10/2005 21 Conclusion SE does not come for free, but can be brought into a project at a reasonable cost. SE can be implemented in gradual steps, providing first the most urgent tools and procedures, and then letting focused pilot projects lead the way for the “full SE approach” Even on a more “code-and-fix” oriented environment, with some effort, SE can be accepted and shared.