A Guerilla Approach to Control System Development

Abstract

We present our experiences in managing the development cycles of the control systems for ANKA and the ALMA Common Software. Our team consists practically only of undergraduate students. Stimulating and rewarding the students with cutting-edge technologies and travel to conferences like this and installation fieldwork are an important positive factor in raising their motivation. However, building any system with a group of inexperienced students is quite a challenging task. Many problems occur with planning deadlines and missing them, organizing and managing development, sources, and documentation and also when dealing with conventional program management rules. To cope with them, we use many tools: CVS for versioning and source archiving, Bugzilla for keeping our bugs in order, a to-do list for managing tasks, an activity log and also many other programs and scripts, some found on the Internet and some made by ourselves. In the end, we had to become organized like a professional company. Documentation and demos can be found on our homepage: http://kgb.ijs.si/KGB. Because of powerful intranet/web front-ends of all those tools, our Internet pages are the central resource for developers, who work mostly off-site.