SKA telescope developer portal

Welcome to the Square Kilometre Array software documentation portal. Whether you are a developer involved in SKA or you are simply one of our many users, all of our software processes and projects are documented or linked to in this portal.

The portal is frequently updated as the project evolves; if you feel that something is missing, please have a look at our guide to contributing to the developer portal

If you’re new to developing the SKA, please have a look at our Onboarding material and the guideance on setting up your development environment.

Note

Please also read the SKA Code of Conduct, which governs all SKA interactions.

What follows is a brief guide to the headings you’ll find in the left-hand sidebar of this site. Feel free to explore!

Getting Started and the SKA Developer Community

This section is about getting you up and running. It contains the onboarding material for all new SKA developers, the general contribution guidelines when working on SKA projects, guidance on setting up your development environment, and a list of projects, so you know what the SKA is working on. There is also a wealth of information about our development tools and practices, which you can read as you start development work.

• Onboarding: Welcome to the SKA developer community
• Contributing to the SKA
• Configuring your development environment

A list of the tools we are using to collaborate, together with guidance on how to use them can be found at this confluence page: SKA Guidelines to Remote Working (requires an SKA Confluence account).

SKA Repositories

Development tools and practices

SKA git repositories

The SKA uses git as its distributed version control system, and all SKA code shall be hosted in an SKA organisation. The gitlab organization ska-telescope can be found at https://gitlab.com/ska-telescope. All SKA developers must have a gitlab account and be added to the organisation. See Working with GitLab for further details.

Working with SKA Jira

Every team is tracking daily work in a team-based project on our JIRA server at https://jira.skatelescope.org. Our internal wiki, Confluence, has guidance on how we use JIRA. We rely on integrations between GitLab and JIRA to manage our work.

• Working with Jira

CI/CD: Continuous Integration and Deployment

CI/CD is at the heart of SKA development, and we use GitLab’s automation extensively, so we can test and deploy our software more efficiently.

• CI/CD

Testing

Tests are a key part of producing working software. We suggest you look at our Software Testing Policy and Strategy, and our BDD testing guide and BDD Walkthrough.

Test Infrastructure

To support our testing and CI/CD pipelines, we have the EngageSKA and other clusters configured to allow testing to happen.

• EngageSKA: CI/CD & Testing Infrastructure
• EngageSKA cluster

Containerisation

To facilitate code portability and reliability and test running, we use containers. We also use kubernetes as our container orchestration system.

• Containers: containerisation and deployment
• Containerisation Standards
• A Quick Introduction to Kubernetes
• Container Orchestration Guidelines
• Multitenancy
• Working with Docker: Proxy Cache
• Hosting a docker image on the Central Artefact Repository

Documentation

While we prefer working code over documentation (as Agile developers), we also recognise that this is a large and long-lived project, so documentation has an important place.

• Documenting a project

Package Release Process

What you need to know in order to release an SKA software package.

• Software Package Release Procedure

Logging

Making sure your software project outputs useful logs for the SKA

• SKA Log Message Format

Monitoring Dashboards

You’ve deployed your code on one of our test systems. Now you want to monitor it.

• Monitoring Dashboards

Bug Reporting

What to do when you find a bug in SKA code.

• Reporting Bugs

Coding Guidelines

Guidelines to the coding standards we apply in the SKA. Not available for all languages.

• Coding guidelines
• C++ Coding Guidelines
• SKA Javascript Coding Guidelines
• Python Coding Guidelines
• VHDL Coding Style Guidelines

FAQ

Questions frequently asked by developers.

• Frequently Asked Questions

Definition of Done

The definition of done is used to guide teams in planning and estimating the size of stories and features:

• Definition of Done

Fundamental SKA Software & Hardware Description Language Standards

These standards underpin all SKA software development. The canonical copy is held in eB, but the essential information is here:

• Fundamental SKA Software Standards

Incident Management

The incident management workflow is used to guide teams in dealing with anomolous conditions that lead to some form of service outage, unexpected system behaviour or degraded system performance:

• Incident Management

About the SKA

For information about the SKA, have a look at this section.

• The SKA Organisation
• SAFe for SKA
• Follow us on social media
• Agile teams and responsibilities
• Follow us on social media

Contribute to the SKA Developer Portal

We encourage all members of the development community to submit improvements to the Developer Portal. These pages describe how you can contribute changes to the Developer Portal.

• Contribute to the developer portal