Multi-agent framework for automatic deployment and state restoration in iterative software development process

Building and deploying software for testing and bug fixing happens quite frequently in software development life cycle. Commonly the client-server software needs just one client machine and one server machine to be redeployed before every testing cycle begins. Our Smart classroom [1, 2] e-Learning system requires 3 computers for a given classroom to capture and stream HD video from 5 video cameras placed at different angles or perspectives. It is done to achieve gaze alignment across all the remote participants by showing the appropriate perspective at each remote classroom display based on the current teaching mode of either lecturing or interaction. Most of test cases require us to test across the full sample setup consisting of one teacher classroom, three remote student classrooms; thus requiring us to install the client software on 12 client machines each time. Our measurements showed that it takes 2-4 minutes to walk to a system, stop the running application, insert the USB hard-drive, uninstall the software, reinstall the software, login to the software, choose the camera and audio publishing settings, publish audio/video, and arrange the video screens. So for the 12 client systems it would like close to 30 to 40 minutes for each test cycle, which causes major disruption to the flow of the development and testing process which happens 100s of times in a 3 to 6 month release cycle. In this paper we present our automatic deployment and restoration framework which refreshes all the client software and restores the current publishing and screen settings in less than 30 seconds for all the computers, which resulted in huge productivity improvements in our software development life cycle.