In June 2024, Observatory Sciences engineer Emma Arandjelovic travelled to Pune, India, to participate in the 23rd Program Increment (PI) planning event for the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO). There are currently ten countries involved in this collaboration to build the world’s largest radio telescope (with more in the pipeline!), so remote working technologies such as Zoom are key but occasional face-to-face meetings such as this one can be incredibly useful to establish close collaborations.
Observatory Sciences currently has seven employees working on the SKAO project. Four are working on the calibration and control subsystems for the SKA-Low telescope, and three are members of the Observation Management and Control teams which work on software across both the Low and Mid telescopes. The SKAO control systems are being built using the Tango framework, which Observatory Sciences now has significant expertise and experience in.
The software engineering effort required to get the telescopes operational is huge, and the distributed nature of the multi-national organisation creates additional challenges. SKAO follows the SAFe methodology which is built around agile working practices. The year is split into four Program Increments, each of which aims to deliver demonstrable value and achieve well-defined goals. A week long planning event kicks off each one to ensure that the work for the next three months is scoped and planned, dependencies are identified and the agile teams are well aligned. A particular highlight of this event was the opportunity to get to know the teams based out in India, who we will be collaborating with on Tango interfaces over the coming months. We look forward to another successful PI!
Photo credits: SKAO