So you want to build a MeeGo-based product? - Vendor Tools and the Vendor Ecosystem

This talk is based on the open systems and processes developed by Nokia and deployed in Nokia and MeeGo to support delivery of mass-market scale MeeGo based product suites.

The session will cover the MeeGo tools currently available to vendors who want to use continuous-integration principles to develop a product; what's needed to get going and an overview of the processes and systems they're likely to need.

Important goals in managing a software product release:

• Efficient processes
• Effective information gathering

I'll look at building MeeGo packages using a local OBS setup and touch on the harder issues this brings up: project and organisational structures and the QA and system administration activities. I'll also look at dealing with the upstream development and release cycles.

Moving on to automation brings the discussion to the different internal systems and processes each vendor will have and how BOSS is designed to handle that.

BOSS (Build Orchestration Supervision System): With a loosely coupled architecture in the build systems area, BOSS uses Ruote to provide a BPA solution that starts of as a very lightweight deployment but one that is capable of being enriched as requirements evolve.

BOSS provides a flexible and adaptable workflow automation solution which initially focuses on QA and handles the build events, tests, notifications and transitions that a package is supposed to experience and trigger as it moves from development through various build, imaging and test phases and into release.

At the data management level we have REVS - the Release Engineering Visibility System. It provides both an authoritative data source (a package database) to support decision making in BOSS processes and a data-warehouse of imported build data to enable reporting and REST status enquiries. The build data is updated in real-time by BOSS.

By encouraging collaboration and sharing of best-practice ideas between vendors in these 'non-differentiating' areas we allow vendors to focus on building great products rather than infrastructure; this vendor ecosystem can also co-operate in encouraging the MeeGo project to be responsive to the vendor's needs.