Approaching Software Engineering for Marine Sciences: A Single Development Process for Multiple End-User Applications

Abstract

Research software is currently used by a large number of scientists on a daily basis, and everything indicates that this trend will continue to increase in the future. Most of this scientific software is very often developed by the researchers themselves, who usually make it available to the rest of the scientific community. Although the relationship between science and software is unquestionably useful, it is not always successful. Some of the critical problems that scientists face include a lack of training in software development, a shortage of time and resources, or difficulty in effectively cooperating with other colleagues. Additional challenges arise in the context of increasingly common cross-cutting and multidisciplinary research. This often results in the developed software and code being slow, not reusable, lacks visibility and dissemination, and in the worst cases it is defective and unreliable. Therefore, a multidisciplinary framework is needed to meet the demands of both scientists and software engineers and handle the situation successfully. However, a multidisciplinary team is not always sufficient to solve this problem, and it is necessary to have links between scientists and developers: software engineers with a solid scientific background. This paper presents the approach used in the framework of the PROTOCOL project, and more particularly in the development of its applied software, in which a tool for the characterization of climate agents has been developed. The main guidelines of the development process include, among others, modularity, distributed control version, unit testing, profiling, inline documentation and the use of best practices and tools.