Analytics and Insights About Cultivating a Software Engineering Community at DLR

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 ongoing 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. The results show that the analyzed active part of the community consists of a small, stable core group, some non-regular visitors, and one-time participants. Participants from nearly all DLR locations attend the workshops. Most participants of the workshop series originate from large research-oriented DLR sites. The workshop topic seems to influence the workshop attendance. The results indicate that we need to do the ongoing topic specialization carefully to cultivate the established core member group.