[Insight-developers] ANN: Transition to CDash is complete

[Bill Lorensen]

Folks,

Over the past couple of months, we have transitioned the ITK nightly
build/test dashboard to CDash (http://cdash.org), a new software
testing server developed by Kitware. CDash combines the best features
of Dart Classic and Dart 2 with many new capabilities that provide a
robust, developer friendly system. Like its predecessors, CDash is
open source. CDash is compatible with Dart/Dart 2 and build/test
clients that use ctest will find the transition painless. See the
CDash FAQ http://public.kitware.com/Wiki/CDash:FAQ for more
information.

Although Dart and Dart 2 still exist, we do not expect to do any
additional development with either system. Groups supporting their
software with either system can continue to do so.

Please change your bookmarks to the new ITK dashboard:
http://www.cdash.org/CDash/index.php?project=Insight

For a brief history of Dart and the earlier software quality efforts
see http://www.cdash.org/about.html .

I'd like to thank the all of the folks who worked on VTK and ITK
software quality since we started the effort at GE Research ten years
ago.

Special thanks to:

Jim Miller (GE CRD), who shared the pain (and glory?) of the original
nightly dashboards for VTK. This system was a conglomeration of shell
scripts, tcl, grep, make, ssh, etc. See
http://www.cdash.org/download/ExtremeTestingTalk.pdf and
http://www.cdash.org/download/VTKExtremeTesting.pdf .

Dan Blezek (GE CRD, now Mayo), who with Jim, designed the
client/server architecture that became Dart and the the database/xml
schema for software testing. Dan's early work with Frost, a GE CRD
internal project, paved the way for using a database to contain test
results.

Pascale Rondot (GE CRD, now Lockheed), who designed the look of the Dashboards.

Andy Cedilnik (Kitware, now Tivo) who replaced the Dart tcl client
with ctest and really made the software quality process easy for
developers.

Terry Yoo (National Library of Medicine) whose vision and funding of
CMake/CTest/Dart enabled all of us to sustain the quality and
portability of ITK, VTK, CMake and others.

Ron Kikinis (Brigham and Womens Hospital) who through NA-MIC, the
National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (http://na-mic.org)
continues to fund open source software quality efforts.

Kitware for sustained support and commitment to open source software
quality efforts through various funding mechanisms.

GE for forcing us to take the 6 Sigma training that seeded the passion
many of us still have for software quality.

Regards,

Bill