The TMT Observatory Software team, the Indian TMT Coordination Center (ITCC), ThoughtWorks software engineers and remote participants in India and Germany recently gathered for the second inception meeting at the TMT project office to discuss the Common Software (CSW) development phase. It was an intense week-and-a-half of discussions and deep-dives on software design and development, methodology, and test and deployment strategy.
Hanne Buur, TMT Observatory Software Project Manager, said, “The inception is an Agile software development process step where we deep-dive into the design before the start of the software development phase. It involves detailed discussions on the requirements/user stories that we are asking ThoughtWorks to develop for us and helps align the team before starting a new major development effort for the Common Software framework and Command Service for the observatory.” At mid-week, ThoughtWorks engineers and the project office observatory software team gave an update presentation on the CSW development effort to interested TMT staff. They showed their work, including an overview of the design updates and the tools for building and testing the TMT software applications. The group also delivered a live demo of the CSW Location and Configuration services to the TMT software stakeholders and introduced the new on-line documentation tool that TMT is using for the CSW Programming Manual. The presentation was met with a very positive reception.
ThoughtWorks and the TMT observatory software team also focused on the next round of development activities and provided a detailed common understanding of the design and implementation strategy that will enable ThoughtWorks to work efficiently and somewhat independently for the next few months. Additional discussions on the development and progress of other software designs, such as the executive software integration (observation sequencer and User Interface design strategy), the software deployment strategy, and the on-line documentation, were also key for the on-going observatory software design activities at the TMT project office.
“The CSW development effort continues to progress very well. ThoughtWorks is a key player in India’s software activities and can provide a strong positive impact on TMT software, including control of the observatory systems and management of the data that will be obtained,” added Christophe Dumas, TMT Observatory Scientist.
The first inception meeting was held in February at ThoughtWorks Indian-based software facility in Pune.
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