IceCube's Development Environment

Abstract

When the IceCube experiment started serious software development it needed a development environment in which both its developers and clients could work and that would encourage and support a good software development process. Some of the key features that IceCube wanted in such a environment were: the separation of the configuration and build tools; inclusion of an issue tracking system; support for the Unified Change Model; support for unit testing; and support for continuous building. No single, affordable, off the shelf, environment offered all these features. However there are many open source tools that address subsets of these feature, therefore IceCube set about selecting those tools which it could use in developing its own environment and adding its own tools where no suitable tools were found. This paper outlines the tools that where chosen, what are their responsibilities in the development environment and how they fit together. The complete environment will be demonstrated with a walk through of single cycle of the development process.