The Real World Software Process

The industry-wide demand for rapid development in concert with greater process maturity has seen many software development firms adopt tightly structured iterative processes. While a number of commercial vendors offer suitable process infrastructure and tool support, the cost of licensing, configuration and staff training may be prohibitive for the small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) which dominate the Asia-Pacific software industry. This work addresses these problems through the introduction of the Real World Software Process (RWSP), a freely available, Web-based iterative scheme designed specifically for small teams and organisations. RWSP provides a detailed process description, high quality document templates - including code review and inspection guidelines - and the integrated tutorial support necessary for successful usage by inexperienced developers and teams. In particular it is intended that the process be readily usable by software houses which at present do not follow a formal process, and that the free RWSP process infrastructure should be a vehicle for improving industry standards

Determining the quality of mathematical software using reference data sets

This paper describes a methodology for evaluating the numerical accuracy of software that performs mathematical calculations. The authors explain how this methodology extends the concept of metrological traceability, which is fundamental to measurement, to include software quality. Overviews of two European Union-funded projects are also presented. The first project developed an infrastructure to allow software to be verified by testing, via the internet, using reference data sets. The primary focus of the project was software used within systems that make physical measurements. The second project, currently underway, explores using this infrastructure to verify mathematical software used within general scientific and engineering disciplines. Publications on using reference data sets for the verification of mathematical software are usually intended for a readership specialising in measurement science or mathematics. This paper is aimed at a more general readership, in particular software quality specialists and computer scientists. Further engagement with experts in these disciplines will be helpful to the continued development of this application of software quality

Knowledge infrastructures for software service architectures

Software development has become a distributed, collaborative process based on the assembly of off-the-shelf and purpose-built components or services. The selection of software services from service repositories and their integration into software system architectures, but also the development of services for these repositories requires an accessible information infrastructure that allows the description and comparison of these services. General knowledge relating to software development is equally important in this context as knowledge concerning the application domain of the software. Both form two pillars on which the structural and behavioural properties of software services can be addressed. We investigate how this information space for software services can be organized. Focal point are ontologies that, in addition to the usual static view on knowledge, also intrinsically addresses the dynamics, i.e. the behaviour of software. We relate our discussion to the Web context, looking at the Web Services Framework and the Semantic Web as the knowledge representation framework

Simplifying the Development, Use and Sustainability of HPC Software

Developing software to undertake complex, compute-intensive scientific processes requires a challenging combination of both specialist domain knowledge and software development skills to convert this knowledge into efficient code. As computational platforms become increasingly heterogeneous and newer types of platform such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing become more widely accepted for HPC computations, scientists require more support from computer scientists and resource providers to develop efficient code and make optimal use of the resources available to them. As part of the libhpc stage 1 and 2 projects we are developing a framework to provide a richer means of job specification and efficient execution of complex scientific software on heterogeneous infrastructure. The use of such frameworks has implications for the sustainability of scientific software. In this paper we set out our developing understanding of these challenges based on work carried out in the libhpc project.Comment: 4 page position paper, submission to WSSSPE13 worksho