Introduction

The idea is to establish an up-to-date repository of information about software projects and teams in order to: facilitate and support GÉANT software engineering community and to create a base and starting point for further analysis and reporting on GÉANT software development efforts.

Functionality overview - the catalogue:

• contains information on software projects and teams;
• focuses on organisational and technical aspects of software development;
• collects information from existing sources in an automated way (e.g. JIRA, source code);
• uses discovery algorithms to identify involved project resources and outcome;
• minimises the need for manual maintenance of presented data;
• covers all development efforts performed in GÉANT;
• introduces a unified structure for stored information;
• is accessible only by GÉANT community members;
• is continuously updated – so that the risk of having an outdated information is minimal.

Background

Information about individual participants in the GN4-2 project and their roles in particular activities and tasks is maintained via the internal COmanage Registry [GN-COmanage]. This type of information management is organised in a delegated manner is designed for virtual collaborations, and very well suited for large collaborations such as the GN4-2 project. Activity and Task Leaders are delegated with the responsibility of managing the information about their task members. Information from this registry is used for generating group mailing lists, making authorization decisions when GÉANT participants access other services, etc. However, this registry does not contain more granular information, for example in which software development teams, an individual is participating. In previous GÉANT projects, the Forge service fulfilled the role of a hub for software efforts [GN-Forge]. At its peak usage, the Forge contained information on 10 projects. However, the service has now been deprecated to the status of archive.

In-depth information about the project software development teams has been already gathered in the survey conducted by the SWM team. 30 software projects are being developed by about 20 software development teams of highly skilled professionals originating from different member NRENs. 

Considering the above, an up-to-date catalogue of software projects and teams needs to be established in order to:

• facilitate and support GÉANT software engineering community, 
• and to create a base and starting point for further analysis and reporting on GÉANT software development efforts.

Example use cases for the catalogue

1. As a software engineer I can search for projects doing a related work so that I can start cooperating.
2. As a software engineer I can search for people with specific competences so that I can start exchanging experience.
3. As a training coordinator I can get an overview of project characteristics so that I can better plan training activities.
4. As a software-dev infrastructure provider I can get an overview on projects and teams so that I can better adjust my service to real community needs.
5. As a ... I can explore the database of software development efforts so that I can get better conclusion about ... .

How it could work – functionality overview

The catalogue:

• indexes software projects and teams;
• indexes organizational and technical aspects of software development;
• covers all development efforts performed in GÉANT;
• introduces a unified structure for stored information;
• is collected in a single and easily available place;
• is accessible only by GÉANT community members;
• is continuously updated – so that the risk of having an outdated information is minimal.

Information maintenance:

• Information about a particular project is maintained by an individual maintainer of the project.
• Information is collected in an automated way as much as possible.

Examples of projects:

• End-user application development;
• Middleware development;
• Delivery of supporting tools (e.g. GIT, JIRA);
• Delivery of supporting services (e.g. software audits, trainings);

Selected beneficiaries

To give an overview potential group of users the following beneficiaries were selected as examples:

1. SA2 T1 in context of (see Task 1: Service Transition and Software Management):
   1. assessment whether the service candidate is ready for production,
   2. software audits for all software products that are planned for production.
   3. organising the Secure Code Training and Software School for developers on a yearly basis.
   4. providing security and quality audits and penetration testing of software solutions to other GÉANT project activities.
   5. coordinating the preparation of the supporting teams for services in production.
2. SA2 T2 (see Task 2: Trust and Identity Operations) operating Trust and Identity-related services for activities that are transitioned into production.
3. SA2 T3 (see Task 3: Multi-Domain Services) operating multi-domain services in production for the duration of the project.
4. SA2 T4 (see Task 4: Production Optimisation) taking care of production optimisation (see Task 4: Production Optimisation)
5. GÉANT IPR Coordinator (see Activities/NA1/T2/IPR) in context of supporting development teams with intellectual property management.
6. GÉANT Training Coordinator
7. (more ...)

Full set of stakeholders with detailed analysis is located here.