DFS Department Standard and recommended development tools
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Standard and recommended tools for DFS

Following gives a list and explanations about tools which are recommended to develop or maintain DFS software:

ANALYSIS and DESIGN PHASES

• several DFS Department members use Rational Rose. It is recommended.

• a configuration management and version control tool:
  • CVS is the standard configuration control tool for DFS.
    You should get an access to this tool as soon as your account is created. If not, or you encounter any problem or need any support, please, contact our system administrators: Carlos or Stephane.
    
    
    
• A Memory Error and Leak Detection tool:
  • Purify is a standard for DFS. It identifies execution errors and memory leaks within your application everywhere they occur, whether or not you have sources. It supports C and C++. The current version works on Solaris and HP with GCC 3.2, and on Linux with GCC 3.3. This tool is available on request from Helpdesk (except for the following machines: dfs3, dfs4 and dfs5, for which you have to contact Carlos). All details about its features and usage.
    
    
• a Performance Profiling tool:
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• A source navigator
  • Source Navigator IDE is recommended as a source code analysis and navigator tool for C, C++, Java, Tcl, [incr Tcl], FORTRAN and even COBOL on Linux:. It's free and can easily be downloaded from the Red Hat Home Page. With it, you can edit your source code, display relationships between classes and functions and members, and display call trees. You can also build your projects, either with your own makefile, or by using Source-Navigator's build system to automatically generate a makefile. It works with the Insight GUI interface for GDB and provides an SDK so that you can write your own parsers.
  • For Java, we recommend Javadoc. It's a well-known tool from Sun Microsystems for generating API documentation in HTML format from doc comments in source code. Also you can get a lot of benefit from the instructions and recommendations to use Javadoc.
    
• A GUI for debuggers:
  • GNU DDD is recommended as graphical front-end for command-line debuggers such as GDB, DBX, WDB, Ladebug, JDB, XDB, the Perl debugger, or the Python debugger. Besides "usual'' front-end features such as viewing source texts, DDD has become famous through its interactive graphical data display, where data structures are displayed as graphs. Sources are available here.
    
    
• coding rules checker:
  • Since we have a successful experience, splint tool is recommended coding rules checker for C. It looks to be even better than its very well-know predecessor (lint) and should be extremely useful for improving robustness. One can select the level of checks to be done (4 levels depending on the criticity of the project). Source code is freely available for any UNIX plat-form. It runs also on Linux 9. More comments about splint.
    
    
• Unit tests tools:
  
  • several DFS Department users have experience with JUnit and is therefore recommended. This is a regression testing framework for defining and running unit tests on Java code. It's an Open Source tool which can be retrieved from here. Also have a look at recommendations about how to write a Unit Test (contribution of USS).
  • CppUnit is the equivalent for C and C++ (port of JUnit to C++) and is also recommended. It can be downloaded from here. Also, read the detailed CppUnit evaluation report done by Olivier. Olivier also made a technical report about CppUnit given useful hints and recommendations about its usage.
  • finally, there is also the same one for Python: PyUnit

INTEGRATION TESTS

• SEG uses several automated test tools written in Shell or Python. Most of DFS components are tested in such way. Experiments with QF test are done to test GUIs.

OTHER

• a Software Problem Reporting tool:
  • Remedy is the ESO standard for Software Problem Reporting tool. It can be used to originate bug report and change requests coming from development and integration testing phases. It's also used by all operations teams using the DFS software (Paranal, La Silla, DFO, USG, OTS, etc, also access to the same database to report problems on the DFS software). There are 2 versions of this tool, a web interface and a GUI (actually a standalone tool running on UNIX, called 'aruser').
    We strongly recommend the latter since its provides more functionality (macros, reporting, ...), is more reliable and the web interface is not supported on some web browsers. The GUI - also called the Action Request System Remedy User - is available on request from the remedy team (ask for the AR user tool version 4 for Windows XP). Here is the link to access the web interface. Preferably, use Internet Explorer (under some circumstance, there can be possible problems with Netscape or other web browsers). To access to the DFS tickets, you will need an account: please, apply following instructions.
    
    
• a tool to publish documents, pages or notes on the DFS Department web site:
  • webcheck is the DFS standard tool for archiving/retrieving DFS documents, web pages, Release Notes, schedules and ToDo lists. All these pages and documents are automatically available from the DFS Department website. Get all details to access and use webcheck.
    
    
• an HTML editor:
  • DreamWeaver is the standard tool at ESO level for producing, editing, maintaining HTML pages. This tool is available on request from Helpdesk. Also, start by looking at very useful recommendations and hints provided by the ESO webmaster. Dreamweaver runs on Windows and MacIntosh. We strongly discourage to use Netscape Composer or WORD for creating or modifying web pages since the HTML code which is generated may not be standard.
    
    
• an XML editor:
  • XXE (or XMLmind XML Editor) is recommended as it has been successfully used by SEG to create and handle test cases. There is a free version called the "standard edition" which currently covers all SEG needs.

 

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