Software engineering initiative of DLR: Supporting small development teams in science and engineering

Abstract

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) conducts research and development in the domains aeronautics, space, energy, transport and security. Software development plays an increasing role in DLR`s research activities. Around 2000 to 3000 persons develop software - in part or full time. Typical development team sizes range from one up to 20 persons. To support such small development teams from different research domains and to establish basic quality of produced software are important challenges. For that reason, DLR started its software engineering initiative to improve sustainability and reproducibility of software products. In this talk, we provide an overview of DLR's software engineering initiative. We present the concept of establishing common guidelines with focus on small development teams, we explain supporting activities such as providing development tools and supporting knowledge exchange, and we report on encountered challenges and the current status. In the second part of the talk, we outline our ideas of establishing additional research domain specific guidelines. In this context, we discuss special requirements towards development of space products and the potential options to complement DLR`s guidelines like a space-specific extension of the ISO/IEC 29110 standard.