Agile Development and Dependency Management for Industrial Control Systems

The production and exploitation of industrial control systems differ substantially from traditional information systems; this is in part due to constraints on the availability and change lifecycle of production systems, as well as their reliance on proprietary protocols and software packages with little support for open development standards [1]. The application of agile software development methods therefore represents a challenge which requires the adoption of existing change and build management tools and approaches that can help bridging the gap and reap the benefits of managed development when dealing with industrial control systems. This paper will consider how agile development tools such as Apache Maven for build management, Hudson for continuous integration or Sonatype Nexus for the operation of "definite media libraries" were leveraged to manage the development lifecyle of the CERN UAB framework [2], as well as other crucial building blocks of the CERN accelerator infrastructure, such as the CERN Common Middleware or the FESA project.