Investigation on Academic Research Software Development

Studying software development processes can help us to understand the software development models which in turn can help programmers to build high-quality software products. Software is not all homogeneous, and industrial software and software developed in academia seem to be different. In order to understand the characteristics of academic software development, we surveyed ten student programmers in five research fields and conducted content analysis. We found that although academic software is highly diverse, the development processes are fairly similar to some extent. We also found some common weaknesses, such as lacking of code management and documentation, and proposed some suggestions to improve the process.