Software Engineering Guidelines - From Theory to Practice

Abstract

Research software is mainly developed by scientists who are domain experts. Most of them have no specific education in software development. To support research scientists at the German Aerospace Center, we created a set of software engineering guidelines for different fields of software development. At RSE17, we already presented the concept of the guidelines. This time, we want to share the practical experiences we collected over the last year.

In this talk, we want to practically introduce the guidelines and the classification scheme. Particularly, we demonstrate their usage in context of two real-world research software applications. The first example demonstrates the usage of the guidelines when starting a new software development. In this case the focus is on finding the initial steps and getting an overview of future aspects. The second example is about an existing, legacy software application. In this case the focus is on analyzing what is already there and finding out the next suitable steps. In this context, the accompanying checklists function as an ongoing planning document and the classification scheme helps to find the suitable starting point.