Abstract: Management of software in a dynamic environment such as is found at Jefferson Lab can be a daunting task. Software development tasks are distributed over a wide range of people with varying skill levels. The machine configuration is constantly changing requiring upgrades to software at both the hardware control level and the operator control level. In order to obtain high quality support from vendor service agreements, which is vital to maintaining 24/7 operations, hardware and software must be kept at industry’s current levels. This means that periodic upgrades independent of machine configuration changes must take place. It is often difficult to identify and organize the information needed to guide the process of development, upgrades and enhancements. Dependencies between support software and applications need to be consistently identified to prevent introducing errors during upgrades and to allow adequate testing to be planned and performed. Developers also need access to information regarding compilers, makefiles and organized distribution directories. This paper describes a system under development at Jefferson Lab which will provide software developers and managers this type of information in a timely user-friendly fashion. The current status and future plans for the system will be detailed. Users There are three types of people involved with the control system software. Software managers who are concerned with the tracking issues described above, the software developers who must provide the information needed for tracking, and the software users who are not directly concerned with these issues but whose work can be adversely impacted when the software managers and developers do not maintain adequate control of their software. Our software management system tries to maintain a balance between the tracking needs of management, the creative needs of software developers, and the reliability needs of software users.
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-10-13
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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