GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung
Discussion Coding rules, Quality Assurance and Control
Dear PandaRooters, During the Dubna meeting there will be a discussion on the topic of "quality assurance" for PandaRoot software. Since this is a topic which concerns all the developers and users of PandaRoot, I find it important to also have your opinion about this issue. The critical question is how much "ruling" we should impose on the developers writing the code. On one hand, "ruling" will garantuee the maintainability of our software, but on the other hand, too much ruling will demotivate people, e.g. introducing - for instance - a high threshold for starting developers. The question is where to place the line, e.g. where to find the balance between "trust" and "do not trust" (rules). At the moment, we are not imposing a lot of rules for developers. In stead we have guidelines (Root coding conventions, framework conventions) and exploit the concept of "many eyes will find the bug". Is this sufficient to garantuee a software framework which should have a long lifetime? I would certainly like to have your opinion about this. Some time ago, a policy document was setup by various people within the collaboration. This document can be found on our wiki site http://panda-wiki.gsi.de/cgi-bin/view/Computing/ComputingPolicies We could use it as input for our discussions. On Monday the 2nd of July, we will have a discussion about this topic during the computing subgroup meeting. I would like to ask you to think about it, so that we can take your opinion into account as well. On Friday that week this issue will be openly discussed in the plenary session. For that, I would like to make a proposal to the collaboration. For those, who can not participate in Dubna, please email me your opinion before Monday.... Kind wishes, Johan.