A literature review of agile practices and their effects in scientific software development

Sletholt, Magnus Thorstein; Hannay, Jo Erskine; Pfahl, Dietmar; Benestad, Hans Christian; Langtangen, Hans Petter

doi:10.1145/1985782.1985784

Cited by 36 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…[16] LM2: The development methodology used by scientific software developers is similar to the agile development methodology. A series of studies have suggested that scientific projects are wellsuited for agile development methodologies [2,3,[20][21][22][23][24]. When scientific projects are investigating new science, they are not able to determine all of the requirements in advance.…”

Section: The Developer Forms a Basic Idea Of What Is Needed And Beginsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Claims about the use of software engineering practices in science: A systematic literature review

Heaton

Carver

2015

Information and Software Technology

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a b s t r a c tContext: Scientists have become increasingly reliant on software in order to perform research that is too timeintensive, expensive, or dangerous to perform physically. Because the results produced by the software drive important decisions, the software must be correct and developed efficiently. Various software engineering practices have been shown to increase correctness and efficiency in the development of traditional software. It is unclear whether these observations will hold in a scientific context.Objective: This paper evaluates claims from software engineers and scientific software developers about 12 different software engineering practices and their use in developing scientific software. Method:We performed a systematic literature review examining claims about how scientists develop software. Of the 189 papers originally identified, 43 are included in the literature review. These 43 papers contain 33 different claims about 12 software engineering practices. Results:The majority of the claims indicated that software engineering practices are useful for scientific software development. Every claim was supported by evidence (i.e. personal experience, interview/survey, or case study) with slightly over half supported by multiple forms of evidence. For those claims supported by only one type of evidence, interviews/surveys were the most common. The claims that received the most support were: "The effectiveness of the testing practices currently used by scientific software developers is limited" and "Version control software is necessary for research groups with more than one developer." Additionally, many scientific software developers have unconsciously adopted an agile-like development methodology.Conclusion: Use of software engineering practices could increase the correctness of scientific software and the efficiency of its development. While there is still potential for increased use of these practices, scientific software developers have begun to embrace software engineering practices to improve their software. Additionally, software engineering practices still need to be tailored to better fit the needs of scientific software development.

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Section: The Developer Forms a Basic Idea Of What Is Needed And Beginsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Claims about the use of software engineering practices in science: A systematic literature review

Heaton

Carver

2015

Information and Software Technology

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“…The authors recommended choosing the appropriate agile method according to the challenges derived from the embedded system and how can the selected agile method tackle these challenges. The findings of these comparisons indicated that scientific software development projects that have adopted agile have an improved testing process to compare to the traditional methods [38].…”

Section: Hybrid Agile Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agile Software Development Methodologies: Survey of Surveys

Al-Zewairi¹,

Biltawi²,

Etaiwi³

et al. 2017

JCC

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Agile software design and development methodologies have been gaining rigorous attention in the software engineering research community since their early introduction in the mid-nineties in addition to being highly adopted by the software development industry. In the last 15 years, an excessive number of research studies have been conducted on agile methods, a great number of notable methods have been proposed and various surveys have been presented by many researchers. In this study, the authors intend to conduct a literature survey study of the surveys of the different agile methodologies ranging from January 2000 to December 2015 using an intuitive research methodology called "Compare and Review" (CR). Furthermore, these survey papers were classified into four major categories according to their area of study. Additionally, the newly proposed agile methodologies that have not been addressed yet in any other literature review were reviewed and compared in terms of where the changes that they proposed lay on the SDLC.

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“…Agile software practices [6] Figure 2). The Think-Aloud Protocol [3] was used with the coastal scientists to elicit ways of designing an intuitive, self-instructive interface.…”

Section: Methods For Developing Icoast Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

USGS iCoast -- did the coast change?

Liu

Poore

Snell

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the Companion Publication of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work &Amp; Social Computi

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iCoast -Did the Coast Change?" is a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) research project that integrates crowdsourcing and citizen science techniques to develop a web application that allows interested volunteers to tag USGS oblique aerial photographs with qualitative information about the geomorphological changes to the coastline after Hurricane Sandy. iCoast has been collaboratively designed with coastal scientists to ensure that the crowdsourced data produced from iCoast can be used to help validate USGS predictive models of coastal change and to educate the public about coastal erosion after extreme storms. Different mechanisms for interacting with different crowds have been strategically implemented. Various sociotechnical challenges and unexpected outcomes have emerged.

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A literature review of agile practices and their effects in scientific software development

Cited by 36 publications

References 14 publications

Claims about the use of software engineering practices in science: A systematic literature review

Claims about the use of software engineering practices in science: A systematic literature review

Agile Software Development Methodologies: Survey of Surveys

USGS iCoast -- did the coast change?

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