TY - GEN
T1 - A survey of scientific software development
AU - Nguyen-Hoan, Luke
AU - Flint, Shayne
AU - Sankaranarayana, Ramesh
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - Software for scientific research purposes has received increased attention in recent years. Case studies have noted development practices, limitations, and problems in the development of scientific software. However, applicability of the results of these studies to improving the wider scientific software development practices is not known. This paper presents a survey of 60 scientific software developers. The survey was conducted online from August - September 2009, and aims to identify where improvements to scientific software practices can be made. While our results generally confirm previous work, we have found some notable differences. The use of IDEs and version control tools among the surveyed scientific software developers has increased, and trace-ability of scientific software is not as important to scientific software developers as it is to scientific software users. Documentation also appears to be more widely produced than previous studies indicate. However, there remains room for improvement in tool use, documentation, testing, and verification activities for scientific software development.
AB - Software for scientific research purposes has received increased attention in recent years. Case studies have noted development practices, limitations, and problems in the development of scientific software. However, applicability of the results of these studies to improving the wider scientific software development practices is not known. This paper presents a survey of 60 scientific software developers. The survey was conducted online from August - September 2009, and aims to identify where improvements to scientific software practices can be made. While our results generally confirm previous work, we have found some notable differences. The use of IDEs and version control tools among the surveyed scientific software developers has increased, and trace-ability of scientific software is not as important to scientific software developers as it is to scientific software users. Documentation also appears to be more widely produced than previous studies indicate. However, there remains room for improvement in tool use, documentation, testing, and verification activities for scientific software development.
KW - scientific software
KW - scientists
KW - software engineering
KW - survey
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=78149247225&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1852786.1852802
DO - 10.1145/1852786.1852802
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9781450300391
T3 - ESEM 2010 - Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
BT - ESEM 2010 - Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
T2 - 4th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, ESEM 2010
Y2 - 16 September 2010 through 17 September 2010
ER -