Welcome to |project|'s documentation!
=====================================

The Research Development Toolkit (|project|) consists of tools and
processes which help software engineers working on complex,
heterogeneous, software-intensive systems in the following regards:

* Continuous Integration (CI) and Deployment (onto diverse target
  platforms)

* Reproducibility

* Handling of dependencies

* Documentation, cataloging, meta-data and re-use

In the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interactive Technology (CITEC_)
at Bielefeld University is used for internal projects as well as in
cooperation with external partners. So far, 1,400 software
:term:`projects <project>` and about 200 :term:`distributions
<distribution>` have been modeled by more than 100 contributors.

Examples of :term:`distributions <distribution>` in the areas research
and education whose requirements are met by the |project| include an
intelligent apartment, workbenches for domain-specific languages,
service robots, etc. Many of these distributions are comprised of
hundreds of :term:`projects <project>` from diverse domains such as
machine learning, natural language understanding and synthesis,
databases and system monitoring and are mainly developed and
maintained by (PhD) students.

In contrast to other CI and DevOps solutions and services, the
model-based approach employed in the |project| is particularly
suitable for heterogeneous systems combining divers project kinds,
inclusion of 3rd-party elements and complex dependency structures.

.. toctree::
   :hidden:

   vision_concept
   getting_started
   advanced

   build-generator <tools/build-generator>

   reference

   support
   faq

   glossary