DLR Software Engineering Guidelines

bertha: Project skeleton for scientific software

“…This section describes the essential recommendations and best practices from related literature [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] which serve as basis for the project skeleton. All recommendations are language agnostic and grouped into seven categories with no particular order of importance.…”

“…Issues are requests for a certain change (such as a bug fix or feature implementation) and play a crucial role in modern iterative and incremental software development processes such as feature-based development [11]. As the name suggests, issue trackers keep track of issues from their creation (by users or developers) to their completion in the form of an accepted solution by the developer [7]. Modern project management tools also include convenient mechanisms for code review.…”

“…Code formatting tools enable manual and automated checks whether source code is compliant with agreed code formatting rules [8]. Analogously, static code analysis tools perform checks whether the agreed best practices are violated [7].…”

“…For example, unit tests can help to verify the correct behavior of certain functions or modules of the software. Functional tests, on the other hand, help to gain more confidence in the overall function of the software [7].…”

“…This becomes apparent after consulting literature on software engineering in general (such as the influential "Pragmatic Programmer" [2]) and in scientific contexts in particular (e.g., [3][4][5][6]). The vast amount of best practices guides and development guidelines (e.g., those published by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) [7] and the Netherlands eScience Center [8]) further underlines the importance of the topic and may serve as guidance, but often scientists lack the time and/or formal training in software engineering required to ensure sustainable software development [1,5,6]. Too often, this results in poorly maintained software projects of questionable reliability and usability.…”