5 Appendices

5.1 Appendix A: Software Coordination Issues raised Sept 19

Several issues surrounding the coordination of the atm model development and interactions within the group and with collaborators was brought up at the Sept 19, 2001 CCSM programmers meeting. The point was that CCSM as a whole probably has to deal with many of these issues as well. A group discussion ensued. The items discussed included

• loss of control of model versions. Model changes and model versions are either not well enough documented or not well enough communicated within the community. There is a lack of understanding about which mods and which physics are in model versions and runs.
• poor understanding in the model development community about who is doing what.
• how to coordinate changes among several development groups including waccm, fv-dyn, etc.
• how to interact with outside developers including NEC and Fujitsu with regard to access to the repo, testing, verifying code changes, and merging code back into the repository.
• lack of control of a "frozen" version.
• model release frequency.
• concept of a change control or change review board to control changes and slow down and better coordinate the development process.
• inadequate testing standards. "A bug shut us down for 2 weeks".
• lack of policy on repository access.
• inability to secure branches of the repository from global access.
• increasing long term planning and goals for model development.
• whether cgd has the software engineering expertise and resources to do both code development and manage infrastructure.
• how all this fits into software engineering training and consulting.
• how other model development centers and commercial software shops manage their projects.
• the possiblity that the project should hire a computer scientist to look into and plan for software engineering and infrastructure issues.
• what the software engineer new hires might do.
• how the atm model / working group differs from other model development group in terms of coordination and control.
• whether we need to "stop" to get the infrastructure together.
• the fact that there is no clear, well-defined management/coordination plan associated with scidac and that little resources are specifically allocated to deal with the software engineering issues. This is true of other collaborations as well. They focus on code development and not enough on infrastructure.

5.2 Appendix B: Terms

• CCSM: Community Climate System Model
• CSEG: CCSM Software Engineering Group
• CRB: Change Review Board
• CVS: a version control system