Software engineering, research software and requirements engineering

Kurzfassung

Research software is developed with aims and in contexts that differ from other software, by individuals who are often not trained software engineers. Furthermore, research software projects often suffer from resource scarcity, but produce artifacts that are crucial for research and require software engineering. These circumstances have an impact on how software engineering activities are performed in research contexts. This holds in particular for requirements engineering, which plays a crucial role for the success of traditional software engineering projects. In this paper, we discuss the relationship between research software and requirements engineering. For that purpose, we also reflect on research software engineering and its relationship to software engineering research. Closer collaboration between software engineering research and research software engineering creates opportunities for knowledge exchange and better research software engineering practice, and interesting new research questions for software engineering research. This is true also for requirements engineering, where lightweight methods are required, depending on the type of research software developed.