Introduction

Objective

This document describes outlines the facilities and support provided to software development teams (SDTs) in the GN Project. Most of this support is provided , focusing on resources managed by the project's Software Governance and Support function , which is (Task 2 of , Work Package 9 (– WP9T2). It is intended to provide an overview of the available overviews the resources, services, processes, and opportunities , and available to suggest how they support the SDTs' engineering efforts.

The main focus of this guide is on the operationalization guide emphasizes the operational aspects of software development and maintenance by a software development team. The second part of the guide lists a few related pursuits that indirectly support and help the enhancement of the team's work: the PLMfor the teams. Additionally, it highlights related initiatives that indirectly enhance team performance, such as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), GLAD training events, and the framework of Common Best Practices framework.

Intended audience

The This document is designated intended for software development teams in GÉANT working on software projects. In particular, it should help newly created teams to learn the context of GÉANT as the organization, and the services it offers to facilitate software development, especially new teams, to understand the organization's context and the services available to support software development projects.

Software development in GÉANT

Regardless of the software lifecycle adopted by the SDT, it usually involves several typical activities. Below, we outline these activities and describe how they are supported by WP9T2 or other dedicated GÉANT teams support them.

Nowadays, Modern software development process is no longer limited to delivering software with useful features and impressive has evolved beyond delivering functional and user-friendly interfaceinterfaces. Software development The process has become a much more holistic process with the increase of due to increasing complexity, the increase of larger development teams, and the introduction of agile methodologies, which leverages requirements to software development environments to providing more code resilience to issues introduced from multi-participant collaboration and ability to automate the agile methodologies. These factors demand greater code resilience, efficient collaboration, and automation of build and delivery processes, thus the platforms themselves grow and increase complexity of maintenance,leading to more complex platforms and maintenance requirements.

Software development, build&deployment

In order to better To support software development in GÉANT and address the meet SDT needs of SDTs, WP9T2 supports and maintains a number of several software development platforms, which can also be easily integrated to provide even create a more effective and user-friendly environment.

• BitBucket is a Git-based code repository developed by Atlassian, which not only . It secures typical storage and versioning capabilities but also and provides several extensions.
• Jira is an issue and ticket tracker, also commonly used for defining and managing requirements and general software project management. Service Desk and other extensions (like issue collectors) allow the development teams to support their users and customers to get in getting feedback and raise raising issues directly via the dedicated form.
• GitLab is an open-source end-to-end software development platform, that spans spans the entire software development lifecycle from repository management through team communication to task coordination and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), including a simplified form of an issue and bug management.
• Artifactory is a repository for managing software packages and components in various versions that helps to share released software and libraries.
• Bamboo is a CI/CD service that is well integrated with other Atlassian services like BitBucket and Jira. It allows for automating several activities in the software development process. The instance provided by WP9T2 helps is automating automate CI/CD pipelines, which could be used for software integration, testing, and deployment.
• SonarQube is a static code analysis tool that supports quality assurance.

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Due to its distributed organizational structure, GÉANT offers a variety of tools supporting communication within teams and between teams.

There are no project- or team-specific mailboxes for team members that GÉANT would be managed by GÉANTmanage. Instead, they are provided and managed by the team members' home NRENs of the team members.

For instant communication, GÉANT offers and administers a Slack space for instant communication. Several topic-oriented channels already exist, and new ones can be created on demand. The channels could be left publicly open or restricted to specific members. Slack allows for archiving messages, but due to the license restrictions, there is a limit on the number of messages in the archive .is limited due to license restrictions.

Another Confluence (available at https://wiki.geant.org) is another commonly used communication tool is the Confluence wiki. It allows for documenting the work, online collaboration, and data exchange of data. Most projects have dedicated spaces , with clearly separated public and private content. Additionally, Confluence includes several plugins that extend its capabilities for sketching, planning, scheduling events, tracking comments, etc.

Quality assurance

Quality assurance and management (QA) usually relies rely on tests conducted at different levels. In GÉANT it is , the SDTs who are responsible for organizing and executing tests. However, although there are some best practices for SDTs (elaborated by WP9T2) that provide recommendations to the teams with in that respect.

Another quality pillar of quality is static code analysis and review, which is as important as software testing and is necessary to deliver high-quality software products. WP9T2 offers a variety of various code review services: , from the assessment performed solely by a tool (SonarQube and Mend) and interpreted by WP9T2's experts , up to a comprehensive review conducted by human subject-matter experts. The services provide a high level of security and maintainability-related protection for the GÉANT products and can be customized to fit the SDTs' needs.

Also, Jira (managed by WP9T2) is essential for effective practical QA-related work. It allows for tracking the progress of issues and tasks, starting from requirements , through development , up to fixing and verifying defects.

Project analytics and reporting

The primary source of holistic comprehensive information about GÉANT software projects is the Software Catalogue (SC). It is a GÉANT-wide system (hosted and developed by WP9T2) that collects, consolidates, and delivers a variety of information about GÉANT-created software. The SC provides a rich and consistent profile for a single software project, no matter if whether its resources are hosted in a single place or are distributed over the Internet (issue trackers, Git repositories, etc.). That way, SC provides a big picture from two perspectives: the individual project , and the entire organization. Project records cover a broad spectrum of information, including (but not limited to) automatically discovered data, such as team and community members, the adopted technology stack, analytics, and reports (statistics, visualisations visualizations for : code, issues tracker, member's activity), as well as manually maintained information (e.g., basic description, specific practices applied by the team). The SC integrates smoothly with external analytical tools such as SonarQube and Mend , and provides the access to data in GitHub and GitLab (which is coming soon!) to learn more about the project offer than what these tools can tell about the source code and its evolution.

Management of external software libraries, their licences licenses, and their mutual compatibility is also a crucial concern for GÉANT. WP9T2 offers a service based on the Mend tool, which scans the software files and identifies the licenses of various product components. It can be also used to support the interpretation of mutual compatibility of present licences licenses and identification of identifying components with licenses that are not compatible incompatible with the product's licencelicense. In addition, it identified obsolete versions of libraries and those that ate known to be vulnerable.

Help and Knowledge Base 

For technical information, GÉANT provides a dedicated Confluence space with Knowledge Base, which provides that answers to several recurring issues. It is a good starting point for collecting information , and is constantly extended and updated.

General and long-term support

In GÉANT, SDTs are given a high level of great freedom and independence in organizing their internal work, which means that meaning they can most effectively adopt, modify, or customize the work process in the most effective way, depending on actual needs and established patterns that work for them. However, some requirements and constraints are project-wide and need to must be addressed by all teams.

In the area of product licensing and IPR governance, the IPR coordinator provides provides guidance and support in specific cases that require human judgement judgment or advice.

Product Lifecycle Management

The process-oriented framework that is common to all teams is Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), which identifies stages of the software development process and defines criteria for transiting between them.  The criteria are called gates; each gate has several associated requirements associated with them. For example, a team willing to transfer and deploy their product in production needs to must successfully perform a series of checks that will further be reviewed and approved by the Project Management Board will review and approve further. Only then will the product will be made available to the users (either internally within GÉANT or publicly). While some of the checks can be conducted directly by the team, some others are offered and performed by dedicated teams in GÉANT, which provide such services. In the case of transferring the project to production, a comprehensive code review is conducted by WP9T2's Test&Analysis subteam.

PLM is managed by The GÉANT Project Management Office manages PLM, but WP9T2 helps the SDTs in passing pass the PLM gates with Common Best Practices.

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WP9T2's Software Management subteam works and provides support focused on for the optimization of software processes. Specifically, two frameworks have been createddefined and implemented: the Software Maturity Model, which sets objectives that should be addressed by the teams in respective process areas, and the Catalogue of Common Best Practices provide , which provides directional advice on how to address the objectives from the maturity model. These complementary frameworks are complementary and can be implemented and adopted incrementallystep-by-step, depending on the subject teamSDT's needs and context. In addition to that, the Software Management subteam also helps also in implementing implement the best practices in the teams by recognizing their expectations and collaborating with the teams to adapt the practices to their needs. Best practices have been extracted from the knowledge and experience developed by all GÉANT teamsimplement the best.

Training

Effective software development heavily relies on continuous improvement and learning. For that purpose, the GÉANT Learning and Development (GLAD) team organizes and offers training to all GÉANT members. Specifically, two annual events are organized by WP9T2 (under the auspices of GLAD), designated for software developers: School of Software Engineering (SSE) and Secure Code Training (SCT). SSE usually involves a 3-day long workshop focused on a single topic that is both relevant and interesting to the participants. It is not technology-intensive but rather emphasizes developing analytical skills, modellingmodeling, collaboration, and creating creative thinking. SCT is a more technical workshop and is intended to increase the skills of GÉANT's software developers' skills in writing secure code.

To present the tools that are transferred to production, WP9T2 provides workshops, inforshares, and webinars, also co-organized also by GLAD. They have the form of infoshares or webinars., to present the tools and services offered to support SDTs. There are also other pieces of training trainings delivered directly by GLAD. For the details of planned and forthcoming events, please refer to the GLAD calendar.