CI-CD practices at SKA

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an international effort to build two radio interferometers in South Africa and Australia forming one Observatory monitored and controlled from global headquarters (GHQ) based in the United Kingdom at Jodrell Bank. SKA is highly focused on adopting Cl/CD practices for its software development. Cl/CD stands for Continuous Integration & Delivery and/or Deployment. This paper analyses the Cl/CD practices selected by the Systems Team (a specialised agile team devoted to developing and maintaining the tools that allow continuous practices) in relation to a specific software system of the SKA telescope, i.e. the Local Monitoring and Control (LMC) of the Central Signal Processor (CSP), from now on called CSP.LMC. CSP is the SKA element with the aim to process the data coming from the receivers in order to be used for scientific analysis. To achieve this, it is composed of several instruments, called subsystems, such as the Correlator Beam Former (CBF), the Pulsar Search (PSS) and the Pulsar Timing (PST). CSP.LMC communicates to the Telescope Manager (the software front-end to control the telescope operations) all the required information to monitor the CSP's subsystems and the interface to configure them and send the commands needed to perform an observation. In other words, CSP.LMC permits the TM to monitor and control CSP as a single entity.