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- is continuously updated – so that the risk of having an outdated information is minimal.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.