What We Have Learned about using Software Engineering Practices in Scientific Software

The increase in the importance of scientific software motivates the need to identify and understand which software engineering (SE) practices are appropriate. Because of the uniqueness of the scientific software domain, existing SE tools and techniques developed for the business/IT community are often not efficient or effective. Appropriate SE solutions must account for the salient characteristics of the scientific software development environment. To identify these solutions, members of the SE community must interact with members of the scientific software community. This presentation will discuss the findings from a series of case studies of scientific software projects, an ongoing workshop series, and the results of interactions between my research group and scientific software projects.

Dr. Jeffrey Carver is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Alabama. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. His main research interests include empirical software engineering, software engineering for science, software quality, human factors in software engineering, and software process improvement. He has been the primary organizer of the SE4Science workshop series focused on Software Engineering and Computational Science. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society and a Senior Member of the ACM.