[Paraview] stability of paraview

[Andy Cedilnik]

Hi Peter,

I will let other people talk about the stability of ParaView, but I will 
talk about the software process behind ParaView and other Kitware products.

I guess the most important aspect of any products is that what you test 
works perfectly. In ParaView's case, we run about 300 tests every night 
that test ParaView specific operations on several different platforms. 
This is combined with about 800 tests of the Visualization Toolkit VTK, 
which test the VTK's capabilities.

These tests are run every night on all systems and the results are 
submitted to the web page called Testing Dashboard:

http://public.kitware.com/dashboard.php?name=paraview

This way anybody (developer or user) can look at the current state of 
the project.

If you look at it today, you can see some issues that are mostly caused 
by our current effort towards the upcoming ParaView 2.6 and the next 
major release 3.0.

Beyond ParaView, Kitware is a leader in several other open-source 
community driven projects. In addition to this, Kitware plays a vital
role in the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing, by leading 
the engineering and infrastructure efforts.

Large projects like these cannot be developed and maintained without a 
sophisticated software process. We use a novel process based on methods 
from agile development and test-driven development. The process 
incorporates source code control (using tools such as CVS or 
Subversion), build management using CMake, and regression testing using 
CTest and DART. One of the highlights of this process is that it runs 
continuously, simultaneously on multiple platforms, and produces its 
results on web-accessible dashboards. Thus as software is checked into 
the source code repository, it is immediately tested and results posted. 
Developers rapidly obtain feedback on their changes and correct problems 
immediately.

Furthermore the software development process is augmented with Internet 
based collaboration tools. Mailing lists are the most used source of 
information for majority of collaborators. They offer large pool of 
expertise, as well as the source of frequently asked questions. They are 
archived and can be searched. Secondly, there are Wiki Web pages, which 
are community editable Web pages. Each page has an Edit button, where 
anybody can add or update content. Along with this, we rely heavily on a 
set of static and automatically generated web pages. These web pages 
include the regular information about the project, such as 
documentation, where to download it, and other resources. Along with 
that, there are parts generated periodically, such as application 
program interface (API) documentation.

Let me know if you have any question.

Thank you.

       Andy

Peter J. Bismuti wrote:
> Hi, here at Boeing we're contemplating using Paraview as one tool for 
> visualizing solutions from an in-house CFD code (Navier-Stokes). There is 
> concern that an open-source produce won't have an acceptable level of QA.  
> There have been some reports of frequent crashes.  Anybody care to share 
> their experiences or opinions?  
>
> Thanks
> Peter Bismuti
> Boeing
>   

-- 
Andy Cedilnik
Kitware Inc.