Common use of Methodology to Clause in Contracts

Methodology to. achieve the objectives of the project, in particular the provision of integrated services Overall Project Methodologies and Structure The EMI project is strongly oriented to the provision of software and services in support to the operational activities of EGI, PRACE and other DCIs and to the scientific user communities who rely on the distributed computing infrastructures for their research. EMI needs to be able to carry out software development activities to consolidate, standardize and evolve its middleware components and at the same time provide timely and efficient maintenance and support services and release management services to its users. The EMI project methodologies and structure are modelled on standard software engineering concepts used by small and large distributed development activities, both commercial and open source, and on the processes described by the ITIL guidelines, the world most widely accepted approach to IT service management. In particular EMI adopts two concepts from ITIL, those of Functions and Services. The Functions provide project-wide support within the project to the Services; they allow to make economies of scale and to provide a coherent coordination framework to all Services enforcing common guidelines and rules, tools, processes and collaborative environments. The Functions are implemented by the project Work Packages. The Services, conversely, are specific activities provided by the project to the users (both infrastructure providers and research communities) in well defined technical areas. Essentially the Services correspond to the various middleware services and components (or tightly integrated groups of them) that must result in production-quality releases of software to the infrastructures and any related support activities. The Services are implemented by the project Product Teams. In addition, they implement the concept of „self-organizing‟ development teams, which is at the core of modern Agile development methodologies like Scrum. While the Functions (Work Packages) are static and form the structure of the EMI project, the Services (Product Teams) are dynamic and can change during the project execution, as middleware services are phased out or introduced in response to the requirements agreed with the infrastructures and the users. They constitute the project Service Catalogue and are the object of Service Level Agreements in order to better formalize the relationship between EMI and the major infrastructure projects, promote a more business-oriented model for the provision of software services and allow the infrastructures to better monitor the performance of its providers.