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Paper: DISCOS Project Status and Evolution Towards Continuous Integration
Volume: 521, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XXVI
Page: 193
Authors: Bartolini, M.; Orlati, A.; Righini, S.; Buttu, M.; Migoni, C.; Fara, A.; Poppi, S.
Abstract: DISCOS (Development of the Italian Single-dish COntrol System) is the software package providing a control system to the three Italian radio telescopes (Medicina, Noto and SRT dishes). It is based on the ALMA Common Software (ACS) framework, and currently consists of more than 500k lines of code. It is organized in a common core and three specific product lines, one for each telescope. In the last two years we have supported the astronomical validation of the SRT radio telescope, leading to the opening of the first public call for proposals in late 2015. During this period, while assisting both the engineering and the scientific staff, we massively employed the control software and were able to test all of its features: in this process we received our first feedback from the users and we could verify how the system performed in a real-life scenario, drawing the first conclusions about the overall system stability and performance. The exposure to public utilization has highlighted the major flaws in our development and software management process, which had to be tuned and improved in order to achieve faster release cycles in response to user feedback, and safer deploy operations. In this regard we show how the introduction of testing practices, along with continuous integration, helped us to meet higher quality standards.
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