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The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) project aims to develop scientific and control software within a collaboration involving more than 30 teams distributed worldwide. The agile method tailored for large collaborations known as SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) has been adopted to manage such a complex scenario. SAFe provides principles and practices for coordination among various teams involved in the incremental development of software, ensuring a global view of the project status at the individual team and program board levels. The CREAM team is a specialized team responsible for developing both the Local Monitoring and Control software of the Central Signal Processing (CSP.LMC) subsystem and the web graphical interface named Taranta. Within the team, it was observed that, in some cases, Taranta’s features released according to the Definition of Done (DoD) criteria and in alignment with the management’s requests did not fully meet user needs when adopted by teams. The lack of a process allowing for the reconsideration and redevelopment of features, coupled with uncertainty about when these issues could be addressed within the Program Increment, led teams to either underutilize or lose confidence in the whole software. A hypothesis is that the problem could be due to a missing beta testing process for features at the time of release. In the implemented SAFe process, features are demonstrated at the time of release during a system demo, and the team can make limited adjustments based on feedback collected during the session, typically constrained as they are usually already working on another feature. This paper suggests an approach to conduct beta tests that is well integrated within the SAFe framework and specifically its two-level iterations: quarterly and be-weekly ones. The challenges are being able to spend enough time exploring and detecting UX issues (through a beta testing process) and delivering a solution within consecutive sprints, but still adhering to the DoD. The paper outlines the steps for selecting beta users, the types of tests conducted, how feedback was collected and the final considerations. We believe this approach, testing with small groups of SKAO personnel, can be standardized for potential adoption across all the SKAO teams, and potentially also by other large scientific projects that rely on agile development methods.
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