IEEE Software

Process trends can be placed inside a triangular map according to their emphasis on three aspects, represented by the vertices: people, technology, and rigor. Plan-oriented, engineering, and research-based approaches tend to view software as a rigid artifact, so they stress technology and rigor over people. Evolutionary approaches tend to view software development as an organic, skills-driven tech... View full abstract»

Lean knowledge management is today implemented mostly through wikis, which let users enter text and other data, such as files, and connect the content through hyperlinks. Easy setup and a huge variety of editing support are primary reasons for wiki use in all types of intranet- and Internet-based information sharing (see P. Louridas, "Using Wikis in Software Development," IEEE Software, Mar. 2006,... View full abstract»

There can be significant benefits in thinking through a design until you get it "right enough" before launching into a major development effort. One of those times when careful thinking and preparation pay off is when you're designing software that breaks new ground. No one had done color BitBlt graphics before, no one knew what it would take to enhance the existing Smalltalk system to support col... View full abstract»

Without refactoring, complex software-intensive systems become increasingly irregular and thus increasingly chaotic over time. We can understand complex software systems only when they're nearly decomposable and hierarchic. One measure the author uses is lines of source code: the greater the SLOC, the more inertia to change the system will have, the more people it will take to keep it fed, the mor... View full abstract»

The lack of a clear definition about what constitutes a requirements engineer is problematic. Companies trying to establish clear RE responsibilities don't have clear standards on how to train their people, define the role, or choose the right people for the job. The Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering initiative (http://certified-re.de/en) has established a syllabus and a certific... View full abstract»

Not all scientific computing is high-performance computing—the variety of scientific software is huge. Such software might be complex simulation software developed and running on a high-performance computer, or software developed on a PC for embedding into instruments; for manipulating, analyzing or visualizing data or for orchestrating workflows. This special issue provides some flavor of... View full abstract»

The development of scientific software involves risk in the underlying theory, its implementation, and its use. Through a series of interviews, the authors explored how research scientists at two Canadian universities developed their software. These interviews indicated that the scientists used a set of strategies to address risk. They also suggested where the software engineering community could ... View full abstract»

Computational scientists developing software for HPC systems face unique software engineering issues. Attempts to transfer SE technologies to this domain must take these issues into account. View full abstract»

Scientific workflows-models of computation that capture the orchestration of scientific codes to conduct in silico research-are gaining recognition as an attractive alternative to script-based orchestration. Even so, researchers developing scientific workflow technologies still face fundamental challenges, including developing the underlying science of scientific workflows. You can classify scient... View full abstract»

Software engineers at Daresbury Laboratory develop experiment control and data acquisition software to support scientific research. Here, they review their experiences and learning over the years. View full abstract»

An action research project involving scientists from the National Research Council Canada and the Institute for Ocean Technology analyzed difficulties in using software to collect data and manage processes. The project identified three requirements for increasing research productivity: ease of use for end users, managing scientific workflows, and facilitating software interoperability. On the basi... View full abstract»

Computational science is increasingly supporting advances in scientific and engineering knowledge. The unique constraints of these types of projects result in a development process that differs from the process more traditional information technology projects use. This article reports the results of the sixth case study conducted under the support of the Darpa High Productivity Computing Systems P... View full abstract»

A case study using a new complexity measurement framework called Structure 101 tracked the structural complexity of three open source software products through their different releases. The analysis found that, as these software products evolved, a large proportion of structural complexity in early releases at the application-code level progressively migrated to higher-level design and architectur... View full abstract»

Reactive systems that service multiple clients or users are often highly configurable to provide customized, value-added services to individual users. A large configuration space is characteristic of such systems, resulting in a large test state space. A new framework reduces specification complexity and enables automated testing for such systems. A running example from class-5 telephony illustrat... View full abstract»

Checklists are an important part of code and design inspections. Ideally, they aim to increase the number of faults found per inspection hour by highlighting known areas of previous failure. In practice, although some researchers have quantified checklists' benefits, the conclusions' statistical robustness hasn't been as well represented. The author subjects checklists' effectiveness to formal sta... View full abstract»

Code lacking comments, meaningful identifiers, and correct indentation is a nightmare. By studying 30 programs of various sizes to measure what percentage of their source code consisted of comments, meaningful identifiers, and whitespace, the author found that more than half of the code served developers rather than the compiler. The relative composition of the three elements was equally distribut... View full abstract»

Software engineers will do better work and stay with a company if they are motivated - as a result the success of software projects is likely to improve. The authors use the findings from their in-depth review of the 92 studies published in the last 25 years on software engineer motivation to give an overview of what managers need to know to improve motivation among their employees. View full abstract»

The software development process and the resulting product are so complex that no error-detecting approach will ever be able to produce error-free software. The test coverage analyzer was a wonderful tool for measuring how well-tested a piece of software. First, the software being tested is instrumented so that the tool would capture which of the software's logic segments had been executed. Then a... View full abstract»