Design structure and iterative release analysis of scientific software

Abstract

One of the main objectives of software development in scientific computing is efficiency. Being focused on highly specialized application domain, important software quality metrics, e.g., usability, extensibility ,etc may not be amongst the list of primary objectives. In this research, we have studied the design structures and iterative releases of scientific research software using Design Structure Matrix(DSM). We implemented a DSM partitioning algorithm using sparse matrix data structure Compressed Row Storage(CRS), and its timing was better than those obtained from the most widely used C++ library boost. Secondly, we computed several architectural complexity metrics, compared releases and total release costs of a number of open source scientific research software. One of the important finding is the absence of circular dependencies in studied software which attributes to the strong emphasis on computational performance of the code. Iterative release analysis indicates that there might be a correspondence between “clustering co-efficient” and “release rework cost” of the software.