Software Engineering Support Programme

The Software Engineering Support Programme (SESP) (http://www.sesp.cse.clrc.ac.uk/) is an EPSRC support activity to provide and encourage the use of up-to-date software engineering techniques and tools in software development within computational science and engineering. The main goals of this SES Programme are:

• accelerate the introduction and widespread use of high-payoff software engineering practices and technology by identifying, evaluating, and maturing promising or underused technology and practices;
• maintain a long-term competency in software engineering and technology transition;
• enable the UK academic community to make measured improvements in their software engineering practices by working with them directly;
• encourage the adoption and sustained use of standards of excellence for software engineering practice;
• foster collaborations with other groups, in the UK, Europe and the US, that have an interest in the applications of advanced software engineering techniques in computational science.

These goals will improve the level of software engineering practice within UK computational science research groups. As a result, the software they develop will be of a higher quality; more easily developed and maintained; more easily re-used within the community and be computationally more efficient. The main thrust of the programme is to gather together processes and tools that will help improve software engineering in computational science. This can be characterised by the Technology Watch, Assessment and Evaluations process. Although the software engineering community has various very formally defined processes of software assessment and evaluation a rather more pragmatic approach has been defined for SESP.

Technology Watch

- In each elements of the SESP information is gathered on a regular basis and a rolling update made to a Technology Report that would be made available to the community through the SESP Web site.

Assessments

- The starting point of selecting a tool for use in anger is through paper assessment using a basic requirements document. The detail of the assessment would clearly depend on the area being addressed but a there will always be a collection of fundamental requirements such as operating systems, supported languages etc. These paper assessments can identify tools for practical evaluation and much of the material developed in the paper assessments added to the technology watch reports.

Evaluations

- Through the assessment, various tools will be selected for more direct evaluation. They would be used in a realistic context either by SESP staff or those involved in the CCP and HEC programmes and their usefulness and effectiveness documented. Although in general the evaluations would not be placed on critical paths within the CCP or HEC activities, these programmes provide a considerable number of representative software packages that can be made the subject of an evaluation. The evaluations would lead to detailed reports and if successful the deployment of the tool or practice within the main stream.

At present the two major foci for the programme are on software quality assurance and transformation of legacy software.