Advantages of pre-production WLCG/EGEE services for VOs and users

The benefits that the Pre-Production Service (PPS) can offer to VOs and new users will be shown. Current PPS processes will be described so they have a better understanding of the PPS environment. PPS offers a proper place where VOs can test their applications and check their compatibility with upcoming middleware releases. PPS could help VOs improve their applications and at the same time, VOs would be helping PPS to produce better tested middleware releases that would go into Production (PROD) Currently a well-defined set of procedures is followed in PPS, beginning with the pre-deployment activity and finishing with the approval of a new middleware release that can go into PROD. The PPS Coordination Team takes care of supervising all these steps, mainly trying to spot possible bugs in the middleware before it goes into PROD. Unfortunately, VO contribution in this part of the deployment is currently very limited and the PPS team does not have a full feedback from these important groups. One of the problems is that PPS is not very well-known for many VOs and users and this situation should change. When a VO has a new application or there is an upcoming middleware upgrade, they should be aware that they can test it in PPS, helping to discover possible problems before going into PROD. Indeed, PPS sites have a great quantity of free resources that can and should be used. Finally, VO and users should remember that PROD is a critical service not to be used for testing purposes. The PPS team tries to find all possible bugs that could be encountered in upcoming middleware versions before these versions are submitted to PROD. This is a critical process in the middleware release cycle because the fact that the final software released to Production works correctly depends on the effort made in PPS in order to find all possible failures. Regarding VO's software, at this moment it is only tested in PROD sites (with all the risks that this entails). Applications are not tested against upcoming middleware versions before they are actually deployed into PROD. This means that problems are usually detected too late. If VOs and users start to test their applications in PPS they check their compatibility with new middleware before it is actually released to PROD. At the same time they would be helping to discover possible bugs in the middleware that could be corrected before it is released. At the end everybody will benefit from a better production environment. PPS could be the proper place where VO can test their applications and check in advance the compatibility with new middleware releases; helping at the same time with their work to discover bugs in the middleware before it is deployed to production. As well PPS could be a good place for VOs to deploy new versions of their applications or even new services before they are moved to the production environment. We hope that after seeing the poster more VOs and users will be interested in using PPS.