The Challenges of Multi-disciplinary Scientific Software Development

J. Robert Neely
Seminar

Scientific software has always enjoyed its own special niche in the world of programming. From specialized languages, to the deep domain knowledge of its authors, lessons learned in the broader software community have often felt irrelevant or quaint. Yet this community is building increasingly complex software that is expected to survive for decades rather than years, and is also spanning multiple scientific disciplines. As computational science rightly takes its place along theory and experiment as a full-fledged scientific discipline, we must recognize and acknowledge that business as usual may not always be enough. And while science domain experts are clearly required to ensure success, these same leaders who are usually called upon to manage such efforts may often overlook, or simply not understand the importance of a number of other factors key to making a large project run smoothly. In this talk, I