CVM Release Process

Finalizing the Release

Target Dates

New versions of CVM-T will be issued on a quarterly basis, beginning Dec 1, 2010 (10.12.1). This is a nominal schedule in that there will be no new releases if no changes have been made, and releases may be delayed to fix problems or perform additional testing.

Testing

The CVM-H release candidate will be submitted to the Automated Test Framework where it will be evaluated in a number of unit and acceptance tests. The primary acceptance test involves a goodness of fit (GoF) evaluation for the 2008 Chino Hills earthquake. The release candidate passes the testing when the following criteria are met:

• CVM-H and cvm2mesh are successfully built
• All CVM-H unit tests pass
• cvm2mesh is successfully able to extract a Chino Hills 100m mesh
• The SCEC Broadband GoF bias for all periods in the range 1s-10s is less than or equal to the GoF bias computed in the previous release. In other words, the goodness of fit of Chino Hills synthetics versus observed must improve from release to release.

If tests fail or problems are found, they will be corrected and the tests re-run until all tests pass.

Code Freeze

Following successful testing, all CVM-T code bases (cvmh, cvmtest, cvm2mesh, viz-cvm) will be frozen from further changes. This freeze applies to the underlying community velocity model as well. Code freezes must be performed a minimum of three weeks prior to the anticipated release date.

Scientific Review

Scientific review of AWT simulation results and horizontal/profile plots for correctness. A period of one week following a code freeze is allocated to this review activity. The scientific review team is comprised of John Shaw and Andreas Plesch of Harvard University, Geoff Ely of USC, and Kim Olsen of UCSD. The review team makes a recommendation of either to proceed with the release, or hold in order to perform more tests or changes.

Release Authority

The release authority, Phil Maechling, examines the test results and the recommendation of the scientific reviewers and makes the decision whether or not to proceed with the new release. A one week period is allocated for this activity.

Assign Release Tag

A release tag is assigned to the release candidate. Release tags will have the format: YY.MM.RR

where:

• YY: Two digit year
• MM: Two digit month
• RR: Mid-month revision id, starting at 1.

Package Products

The following packages will be posted for download at (TBD):

• cvm-t-system-YY.MM.RR.tgz: Comprehensive package containing CVM-H, cvmtest, cvm2mesh, and viz-cvm.
• cvm-t-cvm-YY.MM.RR.tgz: Package containing CVM-H
• cvm-t-awt-YY.MM.RR.tgz: Package containing cvmtest
• cvm-t-evt-YY.MM.RR.tgz: Package containing cvm2mesh, viz-cvm

User Community Notification

Communication with the user community is accomplished with an email list (cvm-t@usc.edu) with public subscription. Once the product packages have been publicly posted, a notification is sent to this email lists with release notes and information where to get the new version.

Software Defects

Community Reported Defects

Open Trac ticket.

Defects in a Release Candidate

Open Trac ticket. Possibly delay release if a critical defect.

Defects in an Existing Release

A notification is posted to the email subscription list announcing that a defect has been found and assigned a Trac ticket number. When a new release is prepared that addresses the ticket, a notification is sent to the email list.