CI-CD Practices with the TANGO-controls Framework in the Context of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Telescope Project

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is an international effort to build two radio interferometers in South Africa and Australia to form one observatory monitored and controlled from the global headquarters (GHQ) in the United Kingdom. The project is very close to the end of its design phase and many decisions have already been made like the adoption of the Tango-controls framework. The time from the end of the design phases and the beginning of the construction has been called bridging with the goal of promoting CI-CD practices. CI-CD is an acronym for Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery and/or continuous deployment. CI is the practice of merging all developers’ local (working) copies into the mainline very often (at least daily). Continuous delivery is the approach of developing software in short cycle ensuring that it can be released anytime, and continuous deployment is the approach of delivering the software frequently and automatically. The present paper analyzes the decision taken by the system team (a specialized agile team for continuous practices in the Safe framework) for promoting those practices within the Tango-controls framework. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems, ICALEPCS2019, New York, NY, USA