History of ATLAS Software Quality


Introduction

The Quality Control Group was started in April 1999 following the results of the ATLAS Computing Review Report and the Management Action Plan that followed.

C++ Coding Standards

The Quality Control Group decided to take the coding standards produced by the SPIDER project as the basis for discussion. The SPIDER rules include (most of) the old ATLAS coding rules. Proposed modifications and examples can be found here.

The "January 2001" ATLAS C++ Coding Standard Specification version

The 2002 edition

The codewizard tool was put into place in Autumn 2001, and the IRST tool "Rulechecker" was integrated in Spring 2002. SW Dec 2001 week report. , or SW week May 2002 report

Codewizard could no longer be used after the change to the gcc compiler.

Software process

The policy for a new, lighter software process has been formulated by the QC group at the end of 1999 and approved by the CSG and the COB.

A document describing the new software process was openly discussed in Spring 2000 and finally approved by the CSG in September 2000.

The specifications for a User Requirements Review were first proposed and then discussed on 25 January 2001. This is a first seed of a "Review Specification" document.

The first trial of a "new style" review was held on the Atlfast User Requirements document on 25 January 2001. Feedback can be found in the review report.

Liaison with Sub-Detector software groups.

We have carried out several "opinion polls" about QA by contacting all atlas developers who are registered as package authors. See for example the report of Sept 2002

Testing

2004 - Three different testing systems exist within ATLAS. Peter Sherwood becomes Testing coordinator, and work starts to provide a unified interface to the different systems.

Tools

Extensive work has been done on comparing design tools, and also profiling tools. (2002 - 2003)

A large quantity of work has been done on the use of Ruechecker. After many technical problems trying to run it over the whole ATLAS release, Rulechecker is integrated in the RTT testing framework in 2004.

Reviews

Since October 2001 several reviews have been held (see the reviews page) :

The QA procedure has been adopted by other groups, and was als used for the 2005 series of reviews of the whole SW domain


Last updated on 2005-08-04 by Solveig Albrand