SA2 Infrastructure Support Home

Overview

SA2 is responsible to support existing and new infrastructures and projects and to speed up the migration of software development procedures to the ETICS build, test and QA system.

Tasks

SA2.2 Infrastructure support

This task deal with defining and implementing support tracking procedures, integrating it with existing infrastructure support procedures, organizing support shifts and defining escalation procedures to technical experts within the project. The etics support team will also provide the first level support and will track frequently asked questions creating a searchable knowledge base of questions and answers available online.

To organize and provide a first-level user support it is needed to define escalation procedures, report on-line frequently asked questions, and produce a set of guidelines for new infrastructures.

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SA2.3 Analysis of user requirements and implementation strategies

This task deal with the collection and analysis of requirements from ETICS users and infrastructure providers and the identification of solutions to help projects to deploy high-quality software development processes.

• will work with infrastructure providers to assess new requirements and help them customize and deploy the ETICS services into their existing procedures
• will assess the requirements and prioritize them according to their relevance and importance
• will work on the identification of new functionalities to be added to the core services and develop whether possible prototype implementation together with the infrastructure providers in order to validate as early as possible any design assumption

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SA2.4 Extensions of the ETICS Service to new infrastructures

This task consist of the analysis of a meaningful set of applications in existing and new infrastructures, such as those related to the field of the aerospace engineering community and high-performance computing or new EGEE related applications, and the migration of their build, test and validation procedure to ETICS. Read more

Moreover, this task analyses then integration of the ETICS services with existing infrastructure services, such as for example job management and software repository services. Read more

SA2.5 Evaluation of ETICS services "on the field" and strategies for their improvements

This task deal with the evaluation of the current ETICS services in terms of usability, performance and other similar criteria, and the definition of strategies for their improvements. The strategies will be implemented in collaboration with SA1, with SA2 providing proof of concept implementations whenever possible.
The analysis will be done "on the field", together with the users, and the suggestions in order to to constantly improve the usage of the services will be based on real usage feedback. Possible area of analysis are efficiency, scalability and fault tolerance.

SA2.6 Installation Scripts Analysis for the Etics Services

This task deal with the analysis of the Etics automatic deployment scripts. These scripts have been created to deploy the Etics server and repository without needing any particular action from the Etics pool Administrator. The Etics scripts are described in detail to understand deeply how the installation process happens for example during the nightly build, when the Etics server is re-installed each time automatically. These scripts can obviously be used also to install the server manually on a local machine following some simple step. Read more

Deliverables

DSA2.2 User support procedures PM3

DSA2.2 New Infrastructures evaluation plan PM6

Describes the current status of a number of significants new projects and applications, related for example to new EGEE communities, the aerospace community and the DEISA infrastructure, and proposes a selection of applications to be used to validate the ETICS system as a build and test service in those contexts.

DSA2.3 Infrastructure services integration - Analysis PM6

Describes the integration challenges identified in deploying ETICS in the new infrastructures and proposes an integration plan to add the required support in the ETICS service architecture.

It says "new infrastructures", does this mean we dont' have to do it for EGEE?

DSA2.4 Infrastructure services integration - Implementation (Part 1)

Describes the progress on the implementation of the additional service support as identified in the initial analysis.

DSA2.5 Guidelines for adopting ETICS as build and test system

DSA2.6 Infrastructure services integration - Implementation (Part 2)

Describes the progress during the second year on the implementation of the additional service support as identified in the initial analysis.

Milestones

MSA2.1 First new infrastructure applications built and tested with ETICS M9

MSA2.2 ETICS has integrated support for new identified services M12

MSA2.3 Guidelines for adopting ETICS as build and test system provided to NA2 for dissemination M15

MSA2.3 ETICS runs on different infrastructure using user-defined services M20

Quality metrics

• Average time a ticket is assigned to first-level support

The WP is responsible for the first level of support. Tickets are eventually redirected to second levels of support. The quality of the work is measured with the time spent in taking the problem in charge, understanding it and either sorting it out or redirect it to the appropriate second level. The tools chosen for the support procedures must allow for measuring the hours a ticket hold different states. This will allow for collecting this metric.

PM	Rate in hours
PM6	24h
PM12	12h
PM18	9h
PM24	6h

• Ratio of tickets sorted out at first-level support

This metric measures the ability of the WP to gain insight on the ETICS system in order to be able to sort out the problems without redirection to second levels. This metric will be collected as the previous one.

PM	Rate
PM6	50%
PM12	60%
PM18	70%
PM24	80%

• Amount of discussion on mailing lists, forums

This metric measures the ability of the WP to maintain a lively community, thus encouraging and enhancing the self support. The metric will be collected using the facilities provided by the mailing list and forums tools, adding the number of mail posted to the mailing list to the forum topics.

PM	Rate
PM6	200
PM12	800
PM18	1600
PM24	3200

• Number of new applications supported

The WP is responsible for supporting new infrastructures and applications in using the ETICS services. The number of such applications measures the quality of the WP work on that. This metric will be collected according to projects registered in ETICS.

PM	Rate
PM6	0
PM12	1
PM18	3
PM24	5

• Ratio of requirements implements over those collected

The WP collect requirements from both existing and new users and implement those considered priority. The percentage of the requirements that has been accepted and implemented are a measuere of the quality of the WP. The total number of requirements will be available with DSA2.3. We anticipate to need to prioritize requirements, thus not to reach 100% by the end of the project.

PM	Rate in %
PM6	0
PM12	30%
PM18	60%
PM24	90%