Leverage collaborative design techniques to develop a unified interface for the SKA Central Signal Processor

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Central Signal Processor (CSP) is a real-time backend system that processes incoming astronomical signals to produce visibilities and detects and profiles pulsars. The CSP is composed of the Local Monitoring and Control (LMC), the Correlator and Beam-Former (CBF), and the Pulsar Search and Timing (PSS, PST) engines. Each subsystem is developed by a different team in the SKA control software domain following the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to guarantee coherence in the development. The definition of an engineering User Interface (UI) for the CSP is challenging due to the variety of skills that are required to identify the most relevant design concepts and potential roadblocks to an effective representation and the fact that several teams are involved. For this reason, we chose to leverage a collaborative design approach that can easily fit SKA’s biweekly sprint cadence while involving experts from different fields in a “think outside the box” process. Sketches and wireframes undergo multiple refinement sessions that lead to the realisation of an engineering dashboard representing the current state of CSP implementation. User testing sessions constitute the means by which the success of the proposed UI is measured. Additional positive effects are alignment across different teams on the current capabilities of the system and its future development, as well as a way for continuously adapting the UI to the system’s evolution. In this paper, we describe the challenges we faced while coordinating the design across multiple teams, show how the process was implemented to fit the short agile iterations and overall SAFe framework and present the results of the work.