JRA1 Deliverable Review Form

Attach the reviewed document to the deliverable page, put here a link

General comments

The document broadly addresses its description in DoW and thus is a quite good first draft. However, at 55 pages, it is rather excessive, being in places merely an extended high-level overview of other deliverables, such as the release plan, collaborations plan etc.. I did not review the Appendix A, since I understood it is not subject to EMI QA; nevertheless, it is curious to observe that the two documents are not exactly in sync, and I am not sure which has to be adjusted (see detailed comments below).

While presenting the EMI Roadmap and mentioning technical objectives, the document never refers to the actual high level Technical Development Plan (DNA1.3.1), while referring to lower-level plans like the Standardisation one (DJRA1.5.1). Instead of the Roadmap (ordered collection of goals and milestones), the reader is presented with references to other roadmaps and the generic software development plan, which is not actually placed in the context of the European infrastructure vision, as the DoW requires. Specifically, as stems from Appendix A, the European DCI vision is that of a grid of virtualised resources, federated across European research areas, while the presented Roadmap has no explicit indication how it will support the stated vision (the word "virtual" appears only once in the Roadmap section, and in a different context).

The narrative style of the document makes it difficult to pinpoint the specific common collaboration objectives and specific collaboration mechanisms, as requested in the DoW: the objectives and mechanisms are actually described, but are well hidden in the plain text, and are not summarised in either the Executive Summary, or in the Conclusions. Being an EMI deliverable, the document must explicitly describe how collaboration with other projects benefits EMI.

While reviewing the document, I was able to filter out the following specific collaboration objectives:

• Projects will make use of each other products, such as:
  • Software
  • Technologies
  • Know-how
• Projects will work together in developing common standards and approaches
• Projects will share user support
• Project will collectively seek and share user requirements

Also, the following specific collaboration mechanisms were scattered in the text:

• Joint participation in boards and commities
• Usage of common software repositories
• Usage of common user support tools (GGUS)
• Establishment of common SLAs, MoUs and such

I would strongly recommend to include such itemized lists in either the executive summary or conclusions; I surely missed some objectives and mechanisms, so the lists perhaps need to be extended.

The document therefore needs a revision, in order to address the general comments above, taking into account the recommendations and detailed comments below.

Minor notes to the author:

• the draft has no page numbers, therefore page numbering as deduced by MS Office was used below.
• comment numbering below does not coinside with that in the document, as some comments there are about simple editorial corrections.

-- OxanaSmirnova - 12-Dec-2010

The document has been revised to present a clearer structure and a better relationship between Part 1 (The EMI Development and Collaboration Roadmap) and Part 2 (The DCI Collaboration Roadmap), which are now explicitly defined as Part 1 and Part2 to highlight their equal status within the document. A table of milestones and additional information about a number of points have been added or expanded. A number of items mentioned by the reviewers however have probably not been addressed to the level of details requested. The reason for this is that this document is not a replacement for the Collaboration Programs deliverable, the Sustainability deliverable or the Technical Plans deliverables. Detailed descriptions of the collaboration mechanisms, of the common user support tools and workflows, of the technical objectives just to mention a few are left to the respective deliverables. The goal of this document is to present an overall high-level view of the main EMI strategy and milestones, so that the individual deliverables can be better read within a coherent context.

More detailed explanation is given in the replies to individual comments

-- AlbertoDiMeglio - 27-Feb-2011

Additional recommendations (not affecting the document content, e.g. recommendation for future work)

As the document will have no future releases, no additional recommendations are applicable.

Detailed comments on the content

Note 1: The reviewers must list here any observation they want to track explicitly and that require interaction with the authors
Alternatively all changes must be listed in the document itself using Word change tracking features (if you use Word)
Note 2: These comments have to be explicitly addressed by the authors and the action taken must be clearly described

Any other modification, spelling or grammatical corrections, etc must be done directly in the document using tracked changes or similar mechanisms that allows the authors to identify which correction is suggested.

-- FloridaEstrella - 07-Dec-2010