The request
Consilium is a leading global provider of products and systems for navigation safety with a group dedicated to the radar development for civilian and military use. It’s directly present in 19 countries and has built a sales network in more than 50 countries.
The requirement was to increase the performance of the software developed in Qt that acquires data with specific hardware, which is a crucial facet for markets where Consilium operates.
In addition to this, in order to facilitate the sharing and reusing of work in the Qt development teams, we were asked for advice on the internal development workflow. Subversion, used by Consilium at the time, didn’t allow the company workflow to evolve and be completed, and made the coordination complicated between most developing teams working on the same project.
Challenges faced
- Difficulty in understanding where to optimize among the many modules of the application
- Large number of SVN repositories to be migrated to Git with the need to heavily modify the structure of the repositories themselves
Solutions implemented
- Implemented metrics for each module to understand how much each optimization influenced the overall performance on a particular module
- Implemented a tool in Python that applied the necessary changes by relying on SvnToGit
Requirements
- Increase software performance on specific hardware
- Optimize internal team development flows
Develer’s contribution
- Code profiling to speed up applications
- Software optimized for the hardware chosen by Consilium
- Repository migration from SVN to Git allowing easier collaboration
Advantages of our solution
- Introduction of precise metrics to measure application performance and improve it
- Software optimization for hardware chosen by Consilium.
- Repository migration from SVN to Git allowing easier collaboration
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Advantages of our approach
Our solutions were the people in this case. Our certified Qt Specialist staff identified what bottlenecks could be in the application and how to eliminate them. In addition, a critical part for performance was rewritten in OpenGL in order to measure the optimization margin achievable on the custom Consilium platform.
For the consulting part on the revision control methods, Develer proposed a Git-based workflow to optimize workflows. In addition to significantly facilitating conflict resolution, the new workflow made it easier to keep the many custom versions of the Consilium applications synchronized.
Advantages of open source
For both activities carried out in the project, it was fundamental to be able to use available and previously-tested open-source software both in the profiling phase (Valgrind, oprofile) and in the subsequent phase of prototyping OpenGL (apitrace, glintercept).
Client
Consilium
Manufacturer of security systems for navigation and automation
Staff
“Integrating with Consilium technology—which is at the forefront of functionality and safety standards in the military radar sector—and having the possibility to work with their custom hardware platform was an opportunity to test ourselves in a collaborative environment that had very stringent performance requirements.”