Very brief summary of the science tools checkout (Oct. 11-29, 2004)

S. Digel, October 31, 2004

Here are the major issues that were raised in each of the development areas, gleaned mostly from the reports of the evaluators, along with JIRA and Confluence postings.

General issues for the tools

• Naming and ordering of inputs, hidden vs. visible parameters in .par files
  • Is there an FTOOLS convention, e.g., about where input and output file names go in a parameter list?
• FITS details for output files
• Uninformative error messages

Observation simulation

• obsSim - desirability of generating data for just a region of the sky - like a mask or windowing function for the rest of the sky)
• little quantitative evaluation of the sources has been attempted

Likelihood

• Formatting of output
• Estimation of execution time, and/or reporting execution time

Pulsars

• (from Confluence and JIRA) Some difficulties using the first versions of sources with first versions of new tools; iteration is needed

GRBs

• Consistency of response matrix with the event file that it is supposed to be used with

Other issues

• Robustness of installer for Linux
• Confluence itself
• User-level documentation