For a complex experiment like W7X being subject to changes all along its projected lifetime the advantages of a formalized software development method have already been stated . Quality standards like ISO/IEC-12207 provide a guideline for structuring of development work and improving process and product quality. A considerable number of tools has emerged supporting and automating parts of development work.
On W7X progress has been made during the last years in exploiting the benefit of automation and management during software development:
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Continuous build, integration and automated test of software artefacts.
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Syntax checks and code quality metrics.
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Documentation generation.
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Feedback for developers by temporal statistics.
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Versioned repository for build products (libraries, executables).
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Separate snapshot and release repositories and automatic deployment.
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Semi-automatic provisioning of applications.
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Feedback from testers and feature requests by ticket system.
This toolset is working efficiently and allows the team to concentrate on development. The activity there is presently focused on increasing the quality of the existing software to become a dependable product. Testing of single functions and qualities must be simplified. So a restructuring is underway which relies more on small, individually testable components with standardized interfaces providing the capability to construct arbitrary function aggregates for dedicated tests of quality attributes as availability, reliability, performance.
A further activity is on improving the development cycle. The use of release cycles has already provided favourable concentration of work and predictability of delivery times. However, the demand has risen, to react quickly on priority changes from W7X-project management. So a more agile development cycle is being prepared relying on smaller working packages, shorter release cycles and an associated release plan giving the software development responsible the possibility to react on a shorter time scale.
