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 international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project to build two radio interferometers is approaching the end of its design phase, and gearing up for the beginning of formal construction. A key part of this distributed Observatory is the overall software control system: the Telescope Manager (TM). The two telescopes, a Low frequency dipole array to be located in Western Australia (SKA-Low) and a Mid-frequency dish array to be located in South Africa (SKA-Mid) will be operated as a single Observatory, with its global headquarters (GHQ) based in the United Kingdom at Jodrell Bank. When complete it will be the most powerful radio observatory in the world. The TM software must combine the observatory operations based at the GHQ with the monitor and control operations of each telescope, covering the range of domains from proposal submission to the coordination and monitoring of the subsystems that make up each telescope. It must also monitor itself and provide a reliable operating platform. This paper will provide an update on the design status of TM, covering the make-up of the consortium delivering the design, a brief description of the key challenges and the top level architecture, and its software development plans for tackling the construction phase of the project. It will also briefly describe the consortium’s response to the SKA Project’s decision in the second half of 2016 to adopt the processes set out by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) for system architecture design and documentation, including a re-evaluation of its deliverables, documentation and approach to internal reviews.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.