Introduction

This report is aimed at scientific software developers, using or looking to use Fortran 90 and 95 and examines the typical software development lifecycle suggesting tools that could be used at each stage. We have not looked at tools which focus on requirements gathering or high level design, since these are often common to many languages and most subject to personal preference on how (or even if) they are carried out. We will use the `waterfall' or `cascade' software development cycle as a framework for the report. Briefly the parts of the software development cycle we shall consider are:

• design implementation - including coding and code quality assurance,
• source code control,
• compiling - including makefiles,
• testing,
• profiling.

These areas have been covered in previous reports [4,5,7] but it is time to bring these reports up-to-date and include new material and tools available to developers since their publication. Since there is such a large number of tools, this review cannot include them all or even provide comprehensive details of those that we do discuss. However, it should give an idea of the range and capabilities of tools available at the time of writing. This report is one of the outputs of the Software Engineering Support Programme (SESP). Some more detail on SESP is given in section 3.