The design stage of the first phase of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescopes has been recently completed by the SKA Organisation (SKAO). This marks the initial step towards an ambitious vision of designing, constructing, and operating telescopes with an equivalent collecting area of one square kilometre. At the completion of this design stage the project has entered a bridging period to manage work until construction funds are available. During this period many of the software teams from the design stage have been engaged in prototyping lean-agile processes, structures, and practices. By the end of the period the goal is to have pivoted from a document based, stage-gated set of processes arranged around design consortia to a code based, value-flow driven, lean-agile set of processes unified around the Scaled Agile Framework. Two years since the start of this transformation this paper reflects on these processes. We highlight some practices that have been found helpful, as well as the challenges faced. The implementation status is described, along with the main technical and cultural implications, and the preliminary results of adopting a lean-agile culture within the SKA Organisation.
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is an international effort to build two radio interferometers in South Africa and Australia to form one Observatory monitored and controlled from the global headquarters (GHQ) based in the United Kingdom at Jodrell Bank. The project is now approaching the end of its design phase and gearing up for the beginning of formal construction. The period between the end of the design phase and the start of the construction phase, has been called bridging and, one of its main goals is to promote some CI-CD practices among the software development teams. CI-CD is an acronym that stands for continuous integration and continuous delivery and/or continuous deployment. Continuous integration (CI) is the practice to merge all developers local (working) copies into the mainline very often (many times per day). Continuous delivery is the approach of developing software in short cycle ensuring that it can be released anytime and continuous deployment is the approach of delivering the software frequently and automatically. The present paper wants to analyse the decision taken by the system team (a specialized agile team devoted to developing and maintaining the tools that allows continuous practises) together with SKA architects in order to promote the CI-CD practices with TANGO controls framework.
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