The Software Improvement Process - Tools And Rules To Encourage Quality

The Applications section of the CERN accelerator Controls group has decided to apply a systematic approach to quality assurance (QA), the “Software Improvement Process”, SIP. This process focuses on three areas: the development process itself, suitable QA tools, and how to practically encourage developers to do QA. For each stage of the development process we have agreed on the recommended activities and deliverables, and identified tools to automate and support the task. For example we do more code reviews. As peer reviews are resource-intensive, we only do them for complex parts of a product. As a complement, we are using static code checking tools, like FindBugs and Checkstyle. We also encourage unit testing and have agreed on a minimum level of test coverage recommended for all products, measured using Clover. Each of these tools is well integrated with our IDE (Eclipse) and give instant feedback to the developer about the quality of their code. The major challenges of SIP have been to 1) agree on common standards and configurations, for example common code formatting and Javadoc documentation guidelines, and 2) how to encourage the developers to do QA. To address the second point, we have successfully implemented ‘SIP days’, i.e. one day dedicated to QA work to which the whole group of developers participates, and ‘Top/Flop’ lists, clearly indicating the best and worst products with regards to SIP guidelines and standards, for example test coverage. This paper presents the SIP initiative in more detail, summarizing our experience since two years and our future plans.