Advantages, disadvantages and misunderstandings about document driven design for scientific software

Abstract

This study collects qualitative data on the use of a Software Engineering (SE) inspired development process, Document Driven Design (DDD), for developing Scientific Computing Software (SCS). Five SCS projects were redeveloped using DDD and SE best practices. Interviews with the code owners were conducted to assess the impact of the redevelopment. After redevelopment, the code owners agreed that a systematic development process can be beneficial, and they had a positive or neutral response to the software artifacts produced during redevelopment. The code owners, however, felt that the documentation produced by the DDD process requires too great a time commitment and too much up front effort. The concerns expressed by the study participants may be partly a consequence of a delay in ethics approval, which resulted in imperfect communication with the study participants and misunderstandings with respect to the process for creating, and the purpose of, the DDD artifacts. Although the DDD style of documentation has been successful in other domains, the previous claims may not apply in the SCS environment. This study is a first step toward measuring the impact of DDD on SCS. The results of the study are not definitive, but they certainly suggest that further empirical study is warranted.