Case Studies in Document Driven Design of Scientific Computing Software

Abstract

The use and development of Scientific Computing Software (SCS) has become commonplace in many fields. It is used to motivate decisions and support scientific research. Software Engineering (SE) practices have been shown to improve software quality in other domains, but these practices are not commonly used in Scientific Computing (SC). Previous studies have attributed the infrequent use of SE practices to the incompatibility of traditional SE with SC development. In this research, the SE development process, Document Driven Design (DDD), and SE tools were applied to SCS using case studies. Five SCS projects were redeveloped using DDD and SE best practices. Interviews with the code owners were conducted to assess the impact of the redevelopment. The interviews revealed that development practices and the use of SE varied between the code owners. After redevelopment, the code owners agreed that a systematic development process can be beneficial, and they had a positive or neutral response to the software artifacts produced during redevelopment. The code owners, however, felt that the documentation produced by the redevelopment process requires too great a time commitment. To promote the use of SE in SCS development, SE practices must integrate well with current development practices of SC developers and not disrupt their regular workflow. Further research in this field should encourage practices that are easy to adopt by SC developers and should minimize the effort required to produce documentation.