MAC B2: Applying and Adapting Software Engineering Methods and Tools to CSE Research Projects

Overview

Geophysics participates in Project B2 of the Munich Centre of Advanced Computing (MAC). The goal of this project is to apply software engineering methods and tools to the field of Computational Science and Engineering. A challenging question as the software development process in science is significantly different from that in industrial/commercial applications for which these were primarily developed.

Within this project we are mostly concerned with Requirements Engineering for Scientific Computing Projects. Our central sample application in this respect is the seismic wave propagation code SeisSol. Requirements engineering is concerned with defining what the software is expected to do, and supports other development activities, such as design, coding and testing. Currently our focus lies on:

• Requirements Elicitation and Modelling

  We provide a "light" way to capture requirements for scientific computing projects, in order to reduce the effort of learning and performing requirements engineering. A novel domain specific requirements model is proposed to elicit the requirements. The model is tailored to meet the special needs for scientific computing software development.

• Traceability Link Recovery

  Traceability links between source code and requirements documentation (natural language specification) have proven to be beneficial to software comprehensibility, maintainability, reusability and so forth. It is also helpful for scientific computing software development, since source codes are often very sophisticated as they reflect complicated underlying numerical algorithms. We are working on recovering traceability links by using different techniques, e.g. Information retrieval.

Further project information can also be found in the following paper and the associated doctoral thesis by Dr. Li.

Acknowledgements

This project was funded by the Free State of Bavaria (Förderprogramm "Bayern exzellent").