J. D. Wet’s research while affiliated with European Gravitational Observatory and other places

The VIRGO Gravitational Waves Detector is continuing its commissioning phase. An important element in this phase is the application of Software Engineering (SE) practices to the Control and Data Analysis Software. This article focuses on the most recent achievements in applying and evolving those SE practices as a simple but effective set of standards and tools. The main areas covered are software configuration management, problem reporting, integration planning, software testing, documentation and systems performance monitoring. For each of these key areas a specific tool has been developed or customized, respectively: SCVS (developed on top of CVS) for configuration management, Software Problem Reports (SPR, implemented on top of the WREQ tool) for tracking bugs and change requests, automated test tool (TAT) for software testing, Doxygen for documentation and BigBrother for system performance monitoring. Efforts are underway in building on top of those simple tools an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and in introducing tools and procedures that will aid in the analysis and design phase. This includes templates for writing requirements and