Developing software for a scientific community : some challenges and solutions

There are significant challenges in developing scientific software for a broad community. In this chapter, we discuss how these challenges are somewhat different both from those encountered when a scientist end-user developer develops software to address a very specific scientific problem of his/her own, and from those encountered in many commercial developments. However, many developers of scientific community software are steeped in the culture of either scientific end-user or commercial development. As we shall discuss herein, neither background provides sufficient experience so as to meet the challenges of developing software for a scientific community. We make various proposals as to which development approaches, methods, techniques and tools might be useful in this context, and just as importantly, which might not