Polarsys/Labelling

One of the key processes in the OPEES project is the labeling process that defines how a company is identified to be able to provide the necessary expertise and support services for an OPEES project or component.

Principles and Objectives

The main interest of setting up a labeling process is to guarantee the level of expertise of service providers, and to avoid free-riding behaviors: with the labeling process, we provide the guarantee the labeled service providers are really committed to OPEES and invest in the OPEES components.

End-users objectives

• Maintain a set of skilled service providers on the Polarsys technologies and process,
• Avoid to have one single point of knowledge in case that a company suddenly stop its investments in OPEES components
• Ensure that labeled service providers know the specificities of safety-critical embedded software

Provider objectives

• Get the insurance that the label rewards their investment in OPEES components
• Access to the OPEES market through the label
• Maintain a set of skilled providers

Implementation

It takes time and investment to get the label.
Labels are re-evaluated regularly
Companies need to prove their commitment on the project by:

• having at least one committer on the source of the project for more than 6 months
• or having a committer contributing to the doc, test plan or integration of the project for more than 6 months
• or appointing two active contributors on the project for more than 6 month

Non active committers are filtered out before re evaluation of the label.

Labels are re evaluated each year.

Labels refer to a technology or a tool or a platform
We need to define what label means for a platform like "TOPCASED" containing a lot of assembled tools. There is no special label for training. A company does not need the label to provide training on a given tool but label clearly provides better visibility and better guarantees
Companies can group together to operate on a "release train" like Topcased but those with no label will act as subcontractors of labelled companies

Conditions of loss of the label : after label evaluation, if the minimal labelling criteria (TBD) are not fullfilled the label is lost
There is only one label level for companies with committers. For companies with expertise on a tool and no committer, they should consider contributing in source, test or documentation and then request "committer" rights. In case the existing tool committers do not accept the request, it is possible to forward the request to the steering committee that is able to accept the "committer" request.

Open questions

We need to define what label means for a platform like "TOPCASED" containing a lot of assembled tools.

We need to create the notion of "Skill Maintenance Program" that should be described by each labelled company.