ATLAS Qualification Interface Refactoring Strategy

The ATLAS experiment involves over 6000 active members, including students, physicists, engineers, and researchers, and more than 2500 members are authors. This dynamic CERN environment brings up some challenges, such as managing the qualification status of each author. The Qualification system, developed by the Glance team, aims to automate the processes required for ATLAS members to achieve author status. Recently, ATLAS modified the policy behind it, and updates were necessary to put it into effect. The system was developed on top of an outdated framework. In order to ease the transition to the new ATLAS authorship qualification policy, the former solution was updated to a Hexagonal architecture based on Domain Driven Design philosophy. The access to the database has shifted from ORM - Object Relational Mapper - to SQL repositories to align with the team’s development stack. The system’s quality is ensured with automatic tests as part of an effective refactoring process that is transparent to the end user. This refactoring strategy intends to enhance the system to improve code maintainability, efficiency and to increase flexibility to accommodate future changes in the qualification policy.