Checklist-based Software Quality Evaluation of Tango Controls

Abstract

Tango Controls is an open-source framework for distributed control systems used by a growing number of industrial and institutional partners. Despite the many benefits it provides to users, such as a growing community, industrial support, highly scalable, and so on, there are some disadvantages to this trending framework. Uncovering these drawbacks creates users’ awareness while considering using this open-source software in their control systems and motivates the Tango Controls development community to fix these issues. In this study, first, we review the research conducted to evaluate, optimize and compare Tango Controls with other trending commercial and open-source control system frameworks. Afterwards, we evaluate Tango Controls via a checklist-based approach by considering two types of control systems and scrutinizing the frameworks’ documentation. As a result, we detect reliability and security drawbacks that have not been identified in relevant studies as the first step of our future work to optimize Tango Controls by introducing a toolset.