DEVELOPING INFRASTRUCTURAL SOFTWARE FOR PRESERVATION: REFLECTIONS OF LESSONS LEARNED DEVELOPING THE PLANETS TESTBED: Paper - iPres 2010 - Vienna

The Planets Testbed, a key outcome of the EC co-funded Planets project, is a web based application that provides a controlled environment where users can perform experiments on a variety of preservation tools using sample data and a standardised yet configurable experiment methodology. Development of the Testbed required the close participation of many geographically and strategically disparate organisations throughout the four-year duration of the project, and this paper aims to reflect on a number of key lessons that were learned whilst developing software for digital preservation experimentation. In addition to giving an overview of the Testbed and its evolution, this paper describes the iterative development process that was adopted, presents a set of key challenges faced when developing preservation software in a distributed manner, and offers a real-world example of how lessons can be learned from these challenges