Advancement in the development of an Open Source Object Oriented BPSt: development methodology

In order to promote its readability, modularity and maintainability, a new Object Oriented (OO) tool for the simulation of buildings performance, has been developed in the last years. The first results of a comparative validation done on our tool, following the BESTEST standard, have been published in the 2013 IBPSA International Conference. The chosen development methodology aims to achieve efficient and high quality software’s development in the field of Building Performance Simulation tools (BPSts) and is based on an Open Source (OS) development approach. Given the selected approach, the contribution of volunteer developers should be encouraged and supported. To effectively support the work of an OS community, key aspects are tasks automation, traceability and communication in the developing phase. The implemented development methodology is then based on: 1) the use of a Software Forge (SF) to promote communication between community members and to help in the management of the software development life-cycle, 2) the use of UML diagrams to describe community-agreed architectural decisions and enforce their implementation into the project, in a way that their implementation can be automatically checked, 3) the ability to group single tests of different modules in one automatic test session of validation, which also simplify final reporting, 4) the use of inheritance, offered by Object Oriented Programming (OOP), to specialize existing classes which, avoiding rewriting, partially automate code writing. As far as concern the quality of the tool, the definition of specific standards for programming, documenting and validating is also important. In particular, the validation phase has to be carried out in pool of verifiers, well documented and provided as an integral part of the documentation available to the user.