Unified Workflow Tools: An Agile Approach to Developing a Configuration Toolbox

Unified Workflow Tools: An Agile Approach to Developing a Configuration Toolbox

Naureen Bharwani^1,2, Emily Carpenter^1,2

Christina Holt^1,2, Fredrick Gabelmann^3,4, Paul Madden^1,2, Brian Weir^5,4

¹Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES)

²National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Global Systems Laboratory (NOAA GSL)

³Element 84, Inc.

⁴NOAA Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC)

⁵Raytheon Technologies Corp.

The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) Unified Workflow (UW) team is working to modernize and streamline the Unified Forecast System (UFS) workflow framework. By developing tools that are interoperable and highly configurable, we will provide a standardized way to run the UFS applications. EPIC provides project management under the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), the leading approach for adopting agile practices for large organizations. EPIC manages repositories using continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), which minimizes the strain of testing, documentation, and training. Using the agile approach allows for increased visibility, adaptability, and quality of UFS tools and software. This iterative process allows the UW Team to provide detailed roadmaps for when new features and tools will become available and when they can be integrated into existing UFS apps.

The UFS applications required settings need a broad range of configuration file types. With the configuration management tools in the workflow toolbox, users can supply standard formats such as YAML, INI or Fortran namelist files that follow a key/value pair structure. Files that do not adhere to standard structure can integrate formats with a Jinja2 template to fully render configuration files for the UFS component software. With these two tools, the majority of the files needed to configure a given application and its components can be managed to support a variety of experiments and use cases.

On our poster, we will provide an overview of the current workflow toolbox for configuration management, and how users can start interacting with them today, as well as a briefing on how our practice of SAFe methodology allows the UW Team to deliver high-quality and adaptable tools for the UFS community.