cmb@castle.ed.ac.uk (Colin Brough) (04/09/91)
What software engineering practices make the most difference?
I am working in parallel processing research group, partly academic and
partly industrial. On the industrial side our work involves a number of
projects, some under contract to commercial organisations, others more
general, funded by 'affiliation' to the EPCC, but not for a particular
user. We would like to improve the quality and maintainability of
software produced within the EPCC. How? Or at least, what will give us
the biggest benefit for the least cost?
Many of the points listed below will be abhorent to those searching for
an ideal environment for producing software, but such is life! Comments
or techniques on any of the particular issues raised would be
appreciated - if there is sufficient interest I will summarise and post.
- multiple small (1-3 people, full time) projects, each with its own
manager (included in the 1-3).
- many of the programmers have little training in Software Engineering,
but are specialists in their application area - e.g. Physics, Maths, etc.
graduates.
- some of the projects involve modifying large chunks of existing code
(e.g. parallelise this 10,000 line Fortran program....).
- diverse platforms, often very recent parallel processors => lack of
mature development environment as the targets. (A Sun network and
a Sequent Symmetry are available for editing, source code control,
documentation, ...)
- different projects will frequently use different langauges, compilers,
even editors (including C, Fortran, Occam, i860 assembler, vi,
micro-emacs, ...).
Clearly, since we are a research centre we do not want to stifle
creativity, but we do equally want to produce reliable, maintainable
software.
__________________________________________________________________________
Colin Brough Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
cmb@castle.ed.ac.uk James Clerk Maxwell Building
cmb%ed.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Mayfield Road
Edinburgh EH9 3JZ
Phone: +44 31-650-5022 SCOTLAND
Fax: +44 31-662-4712
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