RESULTS

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) is a radio telescope that is under construction in Chile. The software for the project is being developed by the Computing Integrated Product Team, (IPT), which has the responsibility of realizing an end-to-end software system consisting of different subsystems, each one with specified development areas. Within the Computing IPT, the Integration and Test subsystem has the role of collecting, building, testing the software produced and preparing releases. In this paper, the complexity of the software integration and test tasks is analyzed and the problems due to the high geographical distribution of the developers and the variety of software features to be integrated are highlighted. Different implemented techniques are discussed, among them the use of a common development framework (the ALMA Common Software or ACS), the use of standard development hardware and the organization of the developers work in Function Based Teams (FBT). Frequent automatic builds and regression tests repeated regularly on Standard Test Environments (STE) are also routinely used. Advantages, benefits and shortcomings of the adopted solutions are presented