A Relational Database Model for Managing Accelerator Control System Software at Jefferson Lab

The operations software group at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility faces a number of challenges common to facilities which manage a large body of software developed in-house. Developers include members of the software group, operators, hardware engineers and accelerator physicists.One management problem has been ensuring that all software has an identified owner who is still working at the lab. In some cases, locating source code for ''orphaned'' software has also proven to be difficult. Other challenges include ensuring that working versions of all operational software are available, testing changes to operational software without impacting operations, upgrading infrastructure software (OS, compilers, interpreters, commercial packages, share/freeware, etc), ensuring that appropriate documentation is available and up to date, underutilization of code reuse, input/output file management,and determining what other software will break if a software package is upgraded. This paper will describe a relational database model which has been developed to track this type of information and make it available to managers and developers.The model also provides a foundation for developing productivity-enhancing tools for automated building, versioning, and installation of software. This work was supported by the U.S. DOE contract No. DE-AC05-84ER40150