Scientific software process improvement decisions: A proposed research strategy

Scientific research is hard enough; software shouldn't make it harder. While traditional software engineering development and management practices have been shown to be effective in scientific software projects, adoption of these practices has been limited. Rather than presume to create a prescriptive scientific software process improvement manual or leave scientists to determine their own plans with only minimal references as support, we posit that a hybrid approach is required to adequately support and guide scientific SPI decisions. This paper presents a grounded theory approach for determining the driving factors of scientific software process planning activities in order to generate supporting data for a proposed Scientific Software Process Improvement Framework (SciSPIF).