The 35th annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems 2025 in Görlitz, Germany

Large astronomical facilities produce enormous amounts of data that require automatic processing to be able to analyze and publish it in a timely fashion. When the ALMA observatory was planned more than 25 years ago, one of the key requirements was an automatic pipeline to make the data products readily available for the whole community, independent of the PI's background at a particular wavelength and its corresponding processing techniques. For a radio interferometer this was fundamentally different compared to how existing facilities operated at the time. The ALMA data products were supposed to be close to ready for scientific analysis and checked for quality. This led to the development of the CASA/ALMA pipeline with tailored heuristics and supplementary systems to schedule the processing and archiving of the data. In this talk I will review the pipeline developments, its important features in terms of heuristics and book-keeping, data product quality assessment and weblog presentation of the results. The pipeline is now able to process almost all standard observing mode data sets. The planned ALMA upgrade will bring orders of magnitude more data and the challenge to still process it in good time. But the basic concepts of the existing pipeline remain valid and will be transferred to the new system.