Quality Assurance in perfSONAR Release Management

Abstract

Software release management is closely related to the management of software quality since only software with assured quality should be provided to users. While established best practices exist for the development of software within an organization, new challenges arise with the introduction of service oriented architectures which make it possible to develop loosely-coupled systems potentially involving different organizations. For these systems it is not sufficient to test parts individually, but the collaboration issues need to be taken into account. In the perfSONAR project a set of loosely-coupled Web services has been developed to perform and manage measurements of network performance in research backbone networks. For the transition of the service development into the provisioning of permanently operated services, a release management process has been devised. It is presented in this paper highlighting the aspects being taken into account. These are also relevant for similar projects where service oriented architectures are deployed.