Software Engineering and Scientific Research

Luke Nguyen-Hoan (SoCS CECS)

CS HDR MONITORING SISE Research Group

DATE: 2010-04-14
TIME: 13:30:00 - 14:00:00
LOCATION: RSISE Seminar Room, ground floor, building 115, cnr. North and Daley Roads, ANU
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ABSTRACT:
Involvement in the production of software often reduces a scientist's productivity. While this has attracted the attention of software engineering researchers, much of the work to date has focused on improvement of the software itself, and has not investigated how the productivity of scientific research has or could be improved.

In this presentation I will provide an overview of my research topic and the results of a survey of 60 scientific software developers. The survey 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 traceability 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.

BIO:
PhD student in Computer Science. http://cs.anu.edu.au/~Luke.Nguyen-Hoan