Spencer Eldred was born in San Francisco and grew up in the Bay Area. He earned a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. He worked for a semiconductor company in Silicon Valley for 20 years before moving to Maui in 1999. He has returned to college after 30 years to sharpen his technical skills. He is currently a senior at the University of Hawaii Maui College, working towards graduating in May 2013 with a BS in Engineering Technology. Spencer hopes to find a job in Hawaii as an optical engineer or software engineer.

Home State: California
Institute when accepted: University of Hawaii Maui College

Method of Consistently Updating Oceanit’s GEO Satellite Tracking Software Test Platform
Project Site: Oceanit
Mentor: Michael Bush & Scott Libert

Project Abstract:

Oceanit’s GEO Satellite Tracking infrared astronomical camera development is entering the final stages of development and testing.  The final software will have processes running on four separate servers to provide a Graphical User Interface (GUI), control of the camera hardware, image processing, and user login authorization.  In order to accurately provide feedback to the software developers on the functionality of the GUI prior to the final integration with the hardware, the project software has to be consistently built and reliably deployed to the test environment.  The project is automatically being built nightly using Ant scripts in the Hudson / Eclipse Software Integration platform.  The use of shell scripts can perform the tasks of reliably updating the test system environment.  Bash shell scripts were developed to automate and control the deployment of the different software elements to the various servers, to control the starting and stopping of the different server processes while recording each activity in a setup log file.  A list of software code version numbers for the software build to be tested is archived for project tracking.  The scripts are presented in an easy to use menu format that controls the sequence of events.  Key steps in the setup are recorded in separate log files for review if necessary.  The scripts developed for this project provide a consistent and reliable way to deploy the latest software updates for GUI testing and can be modified to provide this same function for future projects.