Annual Report 2011 Max Planck Institute for Astronomy

80 IV. Instrumental Developments and Projects
Credit: MPIA
trac at a glance
trac (http://trac.edgewall.org) is a free and open source
groupware alternative. Mainly developed as web-based
management tool for software projects, it supports software
development teams with tools that are specific to
their needs, such as software configuration management
/ version control or a code browser. Although made
to help software developers, its minimalist approach allows
adapting trac to a wide range of projects, including
instrumentation development.
At MPIA several software and instrumentation projects
now make use of trac and of many of its features:
• The wiki. It is the main access point for the team
members. A simple interface allows them to create
and edit wiki pages. The team can gather con-
Fig. IV.5.2: Each subsystem of Linc-nirvana has a wiki page
with all related information, including meeting minutes, documents,
notes and tickets.
tent; the pages can be structured and formatted in a
comfortably readable way. Pictures and other types
of media can be embedded, as well as content from
other trac modules like the ticket system or the
blog plugin. Files can be attached and referenced
within the wiki page.
• The ticket system. It allows following up issues that
are identified in the course of the project. For software
projects tickets are often used to describe bugs
and their solutions. But tickets can also be used to organize
the workflow and dependencies when developing
hardware. Tickets can be associated with project
milestones and with entities such as systems or