Software development practices in academia: a case study comparison

Understand

Academic software development practices often differ from those of commercial development settings, yet only limited research has been conducted on assessing software development practises in academia.

• Here we present a case study of software development practices in four open-source scientific codes over a period of nine years, characterizing the evolution of their respective development teams, their scientific productivity, and the adoption (or discontinuation) of specific software engineering practises as the team size changes.
• We show that the transient nature of the development team results in the adoption of different development strategies.
• We relate measures of publication output to accumulated numbers of developers and find that for the projects considered the time-scale for returns on expended development effort is approximately three years.