Research Institution Software Development Process Improvement: to Produce High Quality Research Software & Assessment on Technical and Software Package Installation

Abstract

Our objective as a research engineer is to produce high quality research software, from the simple software application to extremely large complex software system platforms able to support large organisation. However, lack of appreciation for the significance of software as a research output often leads to software application created in research institutions being treated as a secondary concern. Commercial software engineers tend to follow more disciplined approach to software development principles & follow best practice, this is the reason why they can create their software application generally more sustainable and usable. We combine our research experience with an appreciation of good software engineering principles to build more readable, reliable, efficient code and continue develop sustainable software framework. In this paper, we design and built a simple framework to allow the software engineer who lack of research context & network security knowledge, able to install and setup the lab authentication system platform. Hence, the system engineer can integrate the software platform with prepared virtual machine image and configure the status of resources via the given guideline in product technical manual. The product quality improvement and verification process will be available during the proposed experiments. The results show that the problems of inconvenience software engineering process and other issues are resolved; at the same time, convenience for the software deployment and the experience & skill of the system engineer also improved.