Don't get taken by surprise: Planning for software obsolescence management at the ALMA observatory
Erich Schmid, George Kosugi, Jorge Ibsen, Morgan Griffith · 2016
ALMA is still a young and evolving observatory with a very active software development group that produces new and updated software components regularly. Yet we are coming to realize that - after well over a decade of development - not only our own software, but also technologies and tools we depend upon, as well as the hardware we interface with, are coming of age. Software obsolescence management is needed, but surprisingly is not something we can just borrow from other observatories, or any other comparable organization. Here we present the challenges, our approaches and some early experiences.