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SWMM 5 REDEVELOPMENT QUALITY ASSURANCE PROGRAM
Citation:
SCHADE, T. AND R. E. DICKINSON. SWMM 5 REDEVELOPMENT QUALITY ASSURANCE PROGRAM. Presented at CHI Conference , Toronto, ON, CANADA, February 23 - 25, 2005.
Impact/Purpose:
to present information
Description:
EPA recently released a new version of the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) that combines a new interface with a completely re-written computational engine. The SWMM redevelopment project proceeded under a Quality Assurance Project Plan (QAPP) that describes methods and procedures to test the quality of the redeveloped code. This paper describes the testing process, presents testing results, and describes the quality assurance program for EPA SWMM into the future. The testing process as outlined in the QAPP includes several layers of testing consistent with software engineering practice. In reality, these practices require significant resources to develop and manage and are probably best left to software development companies to implement. We adopted some of those practices, but many we did not utilize. As a pleasant surprise, we found in our development process a wealth of information in the user community, and we found extraordinary efforts by users to communicate that information to us. We recognize the value of the 30+ years of development and application of SWMM 4. We leveraged this history by producing simulations in SWMM 4 for comparison to SWMM 5. In most cases, SWMM 4 and SWMM 5 results matched exactly. In some cases, we discovered problems with the SWMM 4 code, and in other cases, we found differences in answers attributable to differences in the SWMM 5 implementation. This paper will show types of problems for which SWMM 4 and SWMM 5 will produce different results. We believe that in all known cases the changes to SWMM 5 are reasonable and justified. Our testing results also show some significant performance improvements in computational time. The QAPP describes some of the requirements for the long-term maintenance of SWMM 5, including requirements for documentation, version tracking, and long-term maintenance. It also addresses the problem of maintaining a record of the quality practices applied during the current SWMM redevelopment project and future related software development. As SWMM 5 development continues, these quality practices will be maintained along with the source code and documentation.