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Charge to the Panel

The primary aim of the Review was to allow the Review Panel to consider all aspects of the AIPS++ Project and provide firm suggestions and guidance to the Project where needed. All aspects of the Project were considered in the review, including organization and management of the project, tactical decisions and strategic choices made by the project, and the design and technical details of the project. The AIPS++ Steering Committee asked for ``a clear and hard-nosed objective assessment of the viability of the present approach of, and plans for, the Project, primarily with regards to Management and Design.'' The Panel was asked to respond to the following specific questions:

1.

Is the overall AIPS++ Design suitable to serve the needs (as described in the Requirements) of the Consortium members over the foreseeable future?

2.

Are the various parts of the Design well-integrated together, to produce a coherent whole, which can grow for some time?

3.

To what extent is the Project achieving its first goal to make available ``at least the functionality of existing packages such as Classic AIPS'' by January 1996? If not by then, when?

4.

To what extent will it be possible (easy?) for external programmers to write AIPS++ applications?

• Available infrastructure
• Documentation
• Application ``frameworks''
• Examples (very important!)
• Platform support

5.

Do the existing plans represent sufficient efforts to make it attractive for leading application programmers to implement their ideas in AIPS++, despite the following obstacles:

• Methodology barrier (OOP)
• Language barrier (C++)
• New (``universal'') formalisms
• Psychological barriers
• Software Engineering practices (testing and code policing)

The last two questions are viewed as especially important in view of the fact that many of the AIPS++ applications will (have to) be written by programmers outside the AIPS++ Center. It is felt that, if a flow of high-quality external contributions can be attracted (and managed!), the Project is implicitly healthy.

The Review Panel was not to feel constrained to answer only the above questions, but was asked to identify any changes which it feels will help the Project to progress more surely, and to avoid failure or delays. The Steering Committee asked that these recommendations, if any, implicitly recognize the resource constraints which face the Project.

The Panel did its best to address the specific questions above, but because of the stage the project is at and the paucity of project documentation the Panel has not been able to thoroughly address them all.