ETICS: eInfrastructure for Testing, Integration and Configuration of Software

Welcome to the Wiki home of ETICS: The Grid Quality Process.

Getting Started

You will find here useful links to get you going using ETICS:

• ETICS Homepage
• RegistrationHowTo
• ClientHowTo
• WebAppHowTo
• EticsTutorials
• ReleasesNotes

Table of content

More info

Here are more advanced features and information:

• HowToConvertCertificatesFromP12ToPem
• ClientEditMode
• WebAppHowTo
• NmiHowTo
• UseCases
• EticsRolesAndPermissions
• EticsQuickStart
• EticsGliteTesting
• EticsServiceDeployment
• TestingHowTo
• DeploymentHowTo
• AdministrationHowTo
• SlsMonitoring
• ClientPluginHowTo
• UseCustomPackagerHowTo: when using a custom packager, follow these conventions to make sure the standard publisher will find and publish your packages
• DesignCorner

ETICS stands for: eInfrastructure for Testing, Integration and Configuration of Software

Strategic objectives

The vision and mission of ETICS will be accomplished through the following objectives:

• Establish an international and well managed capability for software configuration, integration, testing and benchmarking for the scientific community. Software development projects will use the capabilities provided by ETICS to build and integrate their software and perform complex distributed test and validation tasks

• Deploy and if necessary adapt best-of-breed software engineering tools and support infrastructures developed by other projects (EGEE, LCG, NMI) and other open-source or industrial entities and organize them in a coherent, easy-to-use set of on-line tools

• Create a repository of libraries that project can readily link against to validate their software in different configurations conditions

• Leverage a distributed infrastructure of compute and storage resource to support the software integration and testing activities of a broad range of software development efforts.

• Collect, organize and publish middleware and applications configuration information to facilitate interoperability analysis at the early stages of development and implementation

• Collect from the scientific community sets of test suites that users can apply to validate deployed middleware and applications and conversely software providers can use to validate their products for specific uses

• Raise awareness of the need for high-quality standards in the production of software and promote the identification of common quality guidelines and principles and their application to software production in open-source academic and research organization. Study the feasibility of a �Quality Certification� for software produced by research projects

• Promote the international collaboration between research projects and establish a virtual community in the field of software engineering contributing to the development of standards and advancement in the art

Abstract

A broad range of projects from a spectrum of disciplines involve the development of software born from the collaborative efforts of partners from geographically spread locations. Such software is often the product of large-scale initiatives as new technological models like the Grid are developed and new eInfrastructures are deployed to help solve complex, computational-intensive problems.

Recent experience in such projects has shown that the software products often risk suffering from lack of coherence and quality. Among the causes of this problem we find the large variety of tools, languages, platforms, processes and working habits employed by the partners of the projects. In addition, the issue of available funding for maintenance and support of software after the initial development phase in typical research projects often prevents the developed software tools from reaching production-level quality. Establishing a dedicated build and test infrastructure for each new project is inefficient, costly and time-consuming and requires specialized resources, both human and material, that are not easily found.

The ETICS effort aims to support such research and development initiatives by integrating existing procedures, tools and resources in a coherent infrastructure, additionally providing an intuitive access point through a web portal and a professionally managed, multiplatform capability based on Grid technologies. The outcome of the project will be a facility operated by experts that will enabled distributed research projects to integrate their code, libraries and application, validate the code against standard guidelines, run extensive automated tests and benchmarks, produce reports and improve the overall quality and interoperability of the software.

ETICS objectives are not to develop new software but to adapt and integrate already existing capabilities, mainly open source, providing other research project with the possibility to focus their effort in their specific research field and to avoid wasting time and resources in such, required, but expensive, activity.

Throughout the duration of the project the ETICS partners will investigate the advantages of making use of the ETICS services, the technical challenges relates to running such a facility and its sustainability for the future.

Developer Area

This area includes some technical pages for the coordination of work.

• BuildSystemWebServiceMethodRequest
• MetricsSchema
• JavaCodingConventions
• UsabilityRequirements

Site Tools of the ETICS Web

•      (More options in WebSearch)
• WebChanges: Display recent changes to the ETICS web
• WebIndex: List all ETICS topics in alphabetical order. See also the faster WebTopicList
• WebNotify: Subscribe to an e-mail alert sent when something changes in the ETICS web
• WebStatistics: View access statistics of the ETICS web
• WebPreferences: Preferences of the ETICS web (TWikiPreferences has site-wide preferences)

Notes:

• You are currently in the ETICS web. The color code for this web is this background, so you know where you are.
• If you are not familiar with the TWiki collaboration platform, please visit WelcomeGuest first.

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