The increasing connectivity, significance of software-defined functionality and penetration of electronics and software into all facets of our lives result in a society that is becoming dependent on smart devices that are part of and form interconnected Systems of Systems. Different research communities refer to these systems by different names, such as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT), and Ubiquitous Computing, all sharing the same paradigm of immersive and distributed sensing and computing.
This proposal addresses industrial pain-points of future Digital Enterprises, related to the integration of heterogeneous data, tools and experts, required for successful Telecom & CPS development and maintenance. These tools and data silos need to be smoothly integrated throughout the engineering disciplines and workflows, and across the boundaries between software management, product management and operations professionals.
This idea is at the cornerstone of the DevOps principles, focused on increasing the automation of software integration, testing, deployment and operation, with utilization of immediate feedback loops on and between all parties. Such environments allow aggregation of integrated engineering data (i.e., towards big data analytics at the boundaries between software development, Industry 4.0 and IoT) and its visualization throughout the product lifecycle. Nowadays, this is a key business concern for European organizations developing CPS and Telecom applications, which have to adopt more lean, agile and iterative project planning, continuous integration and frequent delivery to lower their development costs while increasing quality of their development processes.
To tackle these pain-points, our project will provide a methodology on how to apply DevOps principles in large organizations, taking into account typical constraints from classical Telecom & CPS industries, e.g. related to the integration of legacy systems, or the need to perform quality assurance of processes. Basic integration services deployed on Internet and Cloud technologies will be provided for supporting lifecycle traceability across data silos, and for enhancing process automation, i.e., paving the way towards Future Internet for integrated development and operational environments for software-intensive applications. Finally, added-value methods and tools leveraging on DevOps assets will be developed, encompassing visualization tools and dashboards (from users to tested code, and from metrics to decision for product releases), methods for supporting continuous developer feedback on software quality, and tools for enhancing existing Big Data analytics and process mining of DevOps tool chains. Finally, the project’s technical innovations will be demonstrated on system examples from key application domains, from telecom & 5G applications, to consumer electronics, aerospace & defense industries, and digital marketing sectors.