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  1. SAFe Program
  2. SP-4378

Low ITF as a continuous integration platform

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      The benefits of adopting a continuous integration approach are well known and well documented: "It improves quality, reduces risk, and establishes a fast, reliable, and sustainable development pace." <https://scaledagileframework.com/continuous-integration/>

      Specifically, in the short term the Low ITF Integration Event test efforts are currently impeded by a lack of confidence in the system, due to insufficient testing cadence of a rapidly evolving software system. Automatically running an integration test suite whenever newer versions of subsystems become available will address this. If not addressed, the problem will worsen, as we commence Verification Event testing activities in parallel to continually re-testing new software versions; and again it will worsen when we begin the sequential integration of multiple stations into the AA0.5 array.

      In the medium term, there is an opportunity to increase quality across the project, by providing software teams with rapid feedback on their releases. Also, having a CI platform in place at the Low ITF lays the foundation for us to be able to do low-risk, managed Release-on-Demand into production.

      In the long term, we want to ensure the continuing relevance and value delivered by the Low ITF by providing it with a clear function and purpose (with respect to software) beyond the running of formal integration and verification event test cases.

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      The benefits of adopting a continuous integration approach are well known and well documented: " It improves quality, reduces risk, and establishes a fast, reliable, and sustainable development pace ." < https://scaledagileframework.com/continuous-integration/ > Specifically, in the short term the Low ITF Integration Event test efforts are currently impeded by a lack of confidence in the system, due to insufficient testing cadence of a rapidly evolving software system. Automatically running an integration test suite whenever newer versions of subsystems become available will address this. If not addressed, the problem will worsen, as we commence Verification Event testing activities in parallel to continually re-testing new software versions; and again it will worsen when we begin the sequential integration of multiple stations into the AA0.5 array. In the medium term, there is an opportunity to increase quality across the project, by providing software teams with rapid feedback on their releases. Also, having a CI platform in place at the Low ITF lays the foundation for us to be able to do low-risk, managed Release-on-Demand into production. In the long term, we want to ensure the continuing relevance and value delivered by the Low ITF by providing it with a clear function and purpose (with respect to software) beyond the running of formal integration and verification event test cases.
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    • 1.5
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    • Team_VULCAN
    • Sprint 5

    • PI23 - UNCOVERED

    • Team_VULCAN

    Description

      Currently, Low AIV software testing is based on a systems engineering approach where a test is run as part of a formal integration event, and if the test passes then the milestone is achieved and the test may never need to be run again.

      This approach is insufficient for software, which evolves rapidly, and therefore needs to be updated and re-tested on a similarly rapid cadence. In software it is well understood that infrequent releases with large changesets are risky and difficult to integrate; whereas frequent releases with relatively small changesets are much easier to manage. Frequent releases also reduce the turnaround time for bugfixes, which is essential for AIV.

      However, the successful adoption of this higher cadence release process requires continuous integration (CI) tooling to be in place. As much as possible, we need integration and testing of new releases to be automated.

      This is particularly the case at present, because system integration at the ITF is already impeded by a lack of confidence in the software system, because of the rate at which it is evolving, and a lack of automation to support increasing the testing cadence. This situation will only get worse as we begin integration and verification of multiple AA0.5 stations: without some automation in place, we are condemned to test each station manually.

      Our vision is for the Low ITF to be a true CI platform, where new subsystem versions (whether released or gitlab commits) are automatically deployed to the Low ITF cluster, and a suite of integration tests are automatically run to verify the overall (hardware and software) system.

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              Vani.Naram Naram, Vani
              Drew.Devereux Devereux, Drew
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