Analytics and Insights about Cultivating the Software Engineering Community at DLR

Abstract

Software development increasingly became part of the daily work of many researchers in science and engineering. They are faced with software engineering challenges for which they are not trained. In 2005, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) started the ``DLR Software Engineering Initiative'' to support their researchers addressing these challenges. One of the initiative's core element is to setup and establish an active software engineering community within DLR.

Improving the activities of the DLR software engineering initiative is an on-going challenge. For this purpose, a good understanding of the software engineering community within DLR is required. We present insights about the DLR software engineering community through an analysis of the participation at the annual software engineering knowledge exchange workshops. These workshops can be considered as the annual software engineering community event and offer therefore a good starting point to analyze the community. In our analysis we focus on the return rate of the participants as well as the influence of the workshops topic, it's location, and the participants origins.