[ieeeSW] Review introduction

Paulo Meireles
1 parent dc9068ba
Showing 1 changed file with 29 additions and 30 deletions Show diff stats
ieeeSW/releaseEng3/IEEE_ThemeIssue_ReleaseEng_CD.md
@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ understand how important CD adoption is to their projects.
 We worked on a three-year-long Brazilian government project to evolve an
 existing platform that had technical issues and lacked political support.  The
 evolution project started in a presidential election year and everyone involved
-were under pressure to show results. Even with the re-election of the Brazilian
+was under pressure to show results. Even with the re-election of the Brazilian
 President in 2014, leaderships in governmental agencies ended up changing. Each
 one of them had different political agendas which affected the project's
 requirements previously approved. Despite this scenario of instability, we
@@ -27,26 +27,26 @@ Our team from the University of Brasília (UnB) and the University of São Paulo
 (USP) developed the new platform for the Brazilian Public Software (SPB,
 Portuguese acronym) Portal (www.softwarepublico.gov.br) from 2014 to 2016. The
 SPB Portal evolved to a Collaborative Development Environment [1] and this
-evolution brought about important benefits not just to the Brazilian
+evolution brought important benefits not just to the Brazilian
 government, but also to society as a whole.  For the government, the
-bureaucracy on using the same software across governmental agencies, duplicate
-works, and costs all were reduced. The society gained a transparency and
-collaboration mechanism, since anyone can check the government expenses on
-software and contribute to the software communities. To achieve these goals,
+bureaucracy of using the same software across governmental agencies, duplicate
+works, and costs were all reduced. The society gained a transparent and
+collaborative mechanism, since anyone can check the government expenses on
+software and contribute to software communities. To achieve these goals,
 rather than writing everything from scratch, we decided to integrate several
 free software tools such as Gitlab (www.gitlab.com), Mailman
 (www.gnu.org/software/mailman), Noosfero (www.noosfero.org), and Colab
 (www.github.com/colab).
-During the entire SPB Portal evolution project, we had to handle three distinct
-issues, usual in a software engineering scenario: achieving the goals which have
-guided the platform development, managing the diversity of team project
-members, and communicating effectively with clients (in this case,
-government agents). Handling the interaction of these elements was not easy and
+During the entire SPB Portal evolution project, we overcame three distinct
+issues, usual in a software engineering scenario: (i) achieving the goals which have
+guided the platform development, (ii) managing the diversity of team
+members, and (iii) communicating effectively with clients (in this case,
+government agents). Handling the interaction of these elements was challenging and
 the unstable Brazilian political scenario only made things worse.
 To achieve the SPB project goals, we had to overcome strong political bias tied
-with complicated technical issues and relatively low budget. Because it
+with complicated technical issues and relatively low budget. Because the project
 is open to the public, the government representatives saw the platform as a
 marketing opportunity and sometimes ignored technical advice in favor of
 political decisions. Furthermore, integrating a number of distinct systems to
@@ -54,47 +54,46 @@ work seamlessly was not an easy job. We had to learn how each system worked and
 to come up with ideas of how to integrate them as fast as possible, with a team
 of mostly inexperienced developers.
-We also had to manage the diversity of the SPB team members. This team was
+We also had to manage the diversity of our team members. The team was
 composed of approximately 50 undergraduate students (not all simultaneously)
-together with professors, masters students, professional designers and
+together with professors, master students, professional designers and
 senior developers from the Brazilian free software community. Undergraduate
 students received a scholarship and, for most of them, this R&D project was
-their first professional experience. Seniors developers and masters students
+their first professional experience. Senior developers and master students
 had two important contributions to the project: transfer knowledge to
-undergraduate students and address hard tasks. Finally, professors were
-responsible for interacting with the Brazilian government and controlling the
+undergraduate students and more complex tasks. Finally, professors were
+responsible for interacting with the Brazilian government and controlling
 political pressures applied to the project.
-The third point to be handled was the communication with two independent groups
-of government representatives: requirements analysts and deployment
-technicians. Requirements analysts were the real representatives of the
+Moreover, we needed to communicate with two independent groups
+of government representatives. Requirement analysts were real representatives of the
 Brazilian government in the project and their role was to test new
-features, to provide feedback to the development team, and to report for the
-government leaders. Deployment technicians were in charge of administering the host
+features, to provide feedback to the development team, and to report to
+government leaders. Deployment technicians were in charge of managing the host
 machines wherein SPB platform was running. They were, theoretically,
 responsible for deploying the project. However, the new SPB Portal was composed
-of more than ten different software projects, generating a complex deployment
-process, for instance, working on seven servers.
+of more than ten different software projects, working on seven servers, generating a complex deployment
+process.
 To handle the interaction between these three elements, we realised we needed
 to take control over the deployment process. We used CD as a mean to fulfill
 the government expectations and to provide quick response to their requests,
 which were influenced most of the time by the uncertainties of the project's
 continuity. We believed we would keep the project alive, even in a politically
-unstable and technically complex scenario.  For this reason, we worked hard to
+unstable and technically complex scenario.  For this reason, we focused on automating
 automate the deploy process; for instance, one of our senior developers created
 a Chef-Server (www.chef.io/chef) front-end tool called Chake
-(www.gitlab.com/terceiro/chake) to help us to manage the multiple hosts needed
+(www.gitlab.com/terceiro/chake) to help us manage the multiple hosts needed
 for the project.  We also formed a specific team dedicated to the deployment
 process. This team was responsible for maturing our CD pipeline, giving us
 confidence and agility to comply with government requirements.
 In this report, we describe our CD pipeline and how it improved our delivery
-performance.  The CD made us adaptable for all requested changes and helped us
+performance. Continuous Delivery made us adaptable for all requested changes and helped us
 mitigate those aforementioned political challenges, besides the technical
-issues. Among CD’s known benefits [2], we also explain those which were the most
-important in the project scenario for us: improving customer satisfaction and
-making reliable releases. Both kept the project alive for more two years during
+issues. Among CD’s known benefits [2] we also explain those which were the most
+important in our scenario: improving customer satisfaction and
+making reliable releases. Both kept the project alive for years during
 the worst political crisis after the re-democratization in Brazil.
 ## Our Continuous Delivery Pipeline