Empirical Study of Tool Support in Highly Distributed Research Projects

The EU subsidizes research projects in the ICT area with hundreds of millions of Euros per year with the aim of strengthening Europe´s global competitiveness. A key requirement of EU projects is the involvement of partners from at least three different countries. This leads to highly distributed software environments where company, country, and culture boundaries run in the midst of tasks like requirements engineering, architectural design, implementation or testing. We present results from an empirical study involving more than 50 transnational, multi-million Euro projects of the Sixth Framework Programme. The results show which tools are accepted by developers and used in practice in the respective phases of the software process. Finally, we shape the idea of Research Software Engineering.