The article Software development practices in academia: a case study comparison, published in the Computing Research Repository (CoRR) of arXiv1 in 2015, presents a case study of software development practices in four open-source scientific codes.
| Article information | Details |
|---|---|
| Title | Software development practices in academia: a case study comparison |
| Authors | Derek Groen, Xiaohu Guo, James A. Grogan, Ulf D. Schiller, James M. Osborne |
| Publication | Year 2015, The Computing Research Repository (CoRR)of arXiv, DOI: abs/1506.05272 |
Academic software development practices often differ from those of commercial development settings, yet only limited research has been conducted on assessing software development practices in academia. In this paper Software development practices in academia: a case study comparison, the authors present a case study of software development practices in four open-source scientific codes over a period of nine years, characterizing the evolution of their respective development teams, their scientific productivity, and the adoption (or discontinuation) of specific software engineering practices as the team size changes. The authors show that the transient nature of the development team results in the adoption of different development strategies. They relate measures of publication output to accumulated numbers of developers and find that for the projects considered, the time-scale for returns on expended development effort is approximately three years.
This case study is extremely relevant for better scientific software development as it shows the long-term impact of implementing certain software engineering practices.
