Author: Reszela, Z.
Paper Title Page
MOD3O04 Introducing the SCRUM Framework as Part of the Product Development Strategy for the ALBA Control System 60
 
  • G. Cuní, F. Becheri, D. Fernández-Carreiras, Z. Reszela, S. Rubio-Manrique
    ALBA-CELLS Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
 
  At Alba, the Controls Section provides the software that is needed to operate the accelerators, the beamlines and the peripheral laboratories. It covers a wide range of areas or subsystems like vacuum, motion, data acquisition and analysis, graphical interfaces, or archiving. Since the installation and commissioning phases, we have been producing the software solutions mostly in single-developer projects based on the personal criteria. This organization scheme allowed each control engineer to gain the expertise in particular areas by being the unit contact responsible to develop and deliver products. In order to enrich the designs and improve the quality of solutions we have grouped the engineers in teams. The hierarchy of the product backlogs, represents the desired features and the known defects in a transparent way. Instead of planning the whole project upfront, we try to design the products incrementally and develop them in short iterations mitigating the risk of not satisfying the emerging user requirements. This paper describes the introduction of the Scrum framework as the product development strategy in a service oriented organization like the Computing Division at Alba*.
*D. Fernández-Carreiras et al., 'Using Prince2 and ITIL Practices for Computing Project and Service Management in a Scientific Installation', TUMIB01, Proc. of ICALEPCS'13, San Francisco, CA.
 
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MOPGF172 Bringing Quality in the Controls Software Delivery Process 485
 
  • Z. Reszela, G. Cuní, C.M. Falcón Torres, D. Fernández-Carreiras, G. Jover-Mañas, C. Pascual-Izarra, R. Pastor Ortiz, M. Rosanes Siscart, S. Rubio-Manrique
    ALBA-CELLS Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
 
  The Alba Controls Group develops and operates a diverse variety of controls software which is shared within international communities of users and developers. This includes: generic frameworks like Sardana* and Taurus**, numerous Tango*** device servers and applications where, among others, we can find PyAlarm and Panic****, and specific experiment procedures and hardware controllers. A study has commenced on how to improve the delivery process of our software from the hands of developers to laboratories, by making this process more reliable, predictable and risk-controlled. Automated unit and acceptance tests combined with the continuous integration, have been introduced, providing valuable and fast feedback to the developers. In order to renew and automate our legacy packaging and deployment system we have evaluated modern alternatives. The above practices were brought together into a design of the continuous delivery pipelines which were validated on a set of diverse software. This paper presents this study, its results and a proposal of the cost-effective implementation.
*http://taurus-scada.org
**http://sardana-controls.org
***http://tango-controls.org
****S. Rubio-Manrique, 'PANIC a Suite for Visualization, Logging and Notification of Incidents', Proc. of PCaPAC2014.
 
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TUB3O02 Iterative Development of the Generic Continuous Scans in Sardana 524
 
  • Z. Reszela, G. Cuní, C.M. Falcón Torres, D. Fernández-Carreiras, C. Pascual-Izarra, M. Rosanes Siscart
    ALBA-CELLS Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
 
  Sardana* is a software suite for Supervision, Control and Data Acquisition in scientific installations. It aims to reduce cost and time of design, development and support of the control and data acquisition systems. Sardana is used in several synchrotrons where continuous scans are the desired way of executing experiments**. Most experiments require an extensive and coordinated control of many aspects like positioning, data acquisition, synchronization and storage. Many successful ad-hoc solutions have already been developed, however they lack generalization and are hard to maintain or reuse. Sardana, thanks to the Taurus*** based applications, allows the users to configure and control the scan experiments. The MacroServer, a flexible python based sequencer, provides parametrizable turn-key scan procedures. Thanks to the Device Pool controllers interfaces, heterogeneous hardware can be easily plug into Sardana and their elements used during scans and data acquisitions. Development of the continuous scans is an ongoing iterative process and its current status is described in this paper.
* http://sardana-controls.org** D. Fernandez-Carreiras, Synchronization of Motion and Detectors and Cont. Scans as the Standard Data Acquisition Technique, ICALEPCS2015*** http://taurus-scada.org
 
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THHC3O03 Effortless Creation of Control & Data Acquisition Graphical User Interfaces with Taurus 1138
 
  • C. Pascual-Izarra, G. Cuní, C.M. Falcón Torres, D. Fernández-Carreiras, Z. Reszela, M. Rosanes Siscart
    ALBA-CELLS Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
  • T.M. Coutinho
    ESRF, Grenoble, France
 
  Creating and supporting Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for experiment control and data acquisition has traditionally been a major drain of time and resources for laboratories. GUIs often need to be adapted to new equipment or methods, but typical users lack the technical skills to perform the required modifications, let alone to create new GUIs. Here we present the Taurus* framework which allows a non-programmer to create a fully-featured GUI (with forms, plots, synoptics, etc) from scratch in a few minutes using a "wizard" as well as to customize and expand it by drag-and-dropping elements around at execution time. Moreover, Taurus also gives full control to more advanced users to access, create and customize a GUI programmatically using Python. Taurus is a free, open source, multi-platform pure Python module (it uses PyQt for the GUI). Its support and development are driven by an active and welcoming community participated by several major laboratories and companies which use it for their developments. While Taurus was originally designed within the Sardana** suite for the Tango*** control system, now it can also support other control systems (even simultaneously) via plug-ins.
* Taurus Home Page: http://taurus-scada.org** Sardana Home Page: http://sardana-controls.org*** Tango Home Page: http://tango-controls.org
 
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