The use and development of Scientific Computing Software (SCS) has become commonplace
in many fields. It is used to motivate decisions and support scientific research.
Software Engineering (SE) practices have been shown to improve software quality in other
domains, but these practices are not commonly used in Scientific Computing (SC). Previous
studies have attributed the infrequent use of SE practices to the incompatibility of
traditional SE with SC development. In this research, the SE development process, Document
Driven Design (DDD), and SE tools were applied to SCS using case studies.
Five SCS projects were redeveloped using DDD and SE best practices. Interviews with
the code owners were conducted to assess the impact of the redevelopment. The interviews
revealed that development practices and the use of SE varied between the code owners.
After redevelopment, the code owners agreed that a systematic development process can
be beneficial, and they had a positive or neutral response to the software artifacts produced
during redevelopment. The code owners, however, felt that the documentation produced by
the redevelopment process requires too great a time commitment. To promote the use of SE
in SCS development, SE practices must integrate well with current development practices
of SC developers and not disrupt their regular workflow. Further research in this field
should encourage practices that are easy to adopt by SC developers and should minimize
the effort required to produce documentation. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/20454 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Jegatheesan, Thulasi |
| Contributors | Smith, Spencer, Nedialkov, Ned, Computing and Software |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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