AIV and Commissioning

During full operations, it is expected that observing scripts and the ska-oso-scripting library will be mature and execution of an SBDefinition will use a filesystem script, as explained under OET Environments. However for AIV and commissioning activities, there might be a need to modify scripts to introduce extra steps, checks or workarounds.

Using the OET Environments functionality, AIV teams and commissioning scientists can change scripts and the ska-oso-scripting library to quickly iterate on each execution of an SBDefinition on a branch of ska-oso-scripting. If these changes are useful for future observations then they can be merged into ska-oso-scripting in the ska_oso_scripting.engineering package.

Ideally each ‘workaround’ should be linked to an SKB ticket, reassessed often, and be as short-lived as possible. For example if the issue is with the TMC commands that OSO generates, the command could be manipulated directly in the ska_oso_scripting.engineering.low.workarounds workaround but then the OSO teams should be able to fix the root cause in the pdm_transforms module or upstream in the ODT.

Some workarounds may be longer-lived as they require more complex fixes to other subsystems, or might be sanity-check type actions on device states that make commissioning activities easier or fail faster.