Advanced environment and processes to support the collaborative development of a large operational system

Abstract

The European Ground System Common Core (EGS-CC) is an initiative undertaken as a formal collaboration of ESA, European National Agencies and European Prime Industry. The design of the EGS-CC is component based and following a service oriented architecture. Phase C/D is underway and is being carried out by a complex industrial consortium including twenty teams developing components in parallel across ten countries. The EGS-CC products are being developed through a fast incremental lifecycle and intermediate releases are being made available to stakeholders who are already initiating the integration of EGS-CC into their respective infrastructures. The EGS-CC products will also be distributed to end users who will often need to extend EGS-CC products and develop applications based on it. This imposes very demanding requirements on the Software Development Environment (SDE). Some of the requirements on the SDE come from organisational constraints: there are different types of users, i.e. individual developers, industrial development teams, the EGS-CC Consortium Prime, ESA, the EGS-CC stakeholders and the end-user projects. Other constraints come from the need to be adaptable and flexible in the development to match, as far as possible, the needs of the stakeholders in their own development activities. Finally, since the EGS-CC will be made available as ESA Community open source software, i.e. free, the procurement cost of the associated SDE must be minimised. The SDE supports the full EGS-CC development lifecycle starting from user requirements management up to release and distribution of fully validated software. It has been developed initially under a separate contract from the EGS-CC and later on adapted and extended by the EGS-CC Development Consortium, mainly in the areas of testing and requirements validation. The SDE aims at the highest level of automation, in particular in the areas of document generation, code generation and testing at all levels. It has also been designed to be deployable in different environments, e.g. the individual developer workstation or the ESA hosted collaboration platform. This paper will introduce the development lifecycle for the EGS-CC and describe how the SDE has been designed and integrated to support that lifecycle in different environments. It will also report on the lessons learned from its development and the early experience in its use in the development of the EGS-CC.