Software Engineering Guidelines for Scientists - A Practical Handout for the Developing Researcher

Abstract

In research facilities, scientists often develop software. Most of them do not have any specific education in software development. Usually they had programming courses at university or they self-taught some programming skills. Therefore their knowledge about software engineering and adjacent topics is quite limited. To support scientists, we created a set of software engineering guidelines. These guidelines give advice in different fields of software development (e.g., requirements management, design and implementation, change management). To make it easy to start with them, we developed a simple classification scheme taking aspects into account like expected software size or software lifetime. This scheme is useful to filter the guidelines and to fit them to the right context. Besides providing written guidelines and explanations, we created check list in different formats (e.g., Markdown, Word) to offer scientist a light-weight and easy-to-use tool. In this talk, we provide an overview about the concept of the guidelines and report about experiences introducing them at the German aerospace center (DLR) – a large research facility in Germany. At DLR around 2000 to 3000 persons develop software in part or full time.