A case study: Agile development in the community laser-induced incandescence modeling environment (CLiiME)

The multidisciplinary requirements of current computational modeling problems preclude the development of scientific software that is maintained and used by selected scientists. The multidisciplinary nature of these efforts requires the development of large scale software projects established with a wide developer and user base in mind. This article describes some of the software-engineering practices adopted in a scientific-software application for a laser-induced incandescence community model. The project uses an Agile and Test-Driven Development approach to implement the infrastructure for the development of a collaborative model that is to be extended, modified, and used by different researchers. We discuss some of the software-engineering practices that can be exploited through the life of a project, starting with its inception when only a hand full of developers are contributing to the project and the mechanism we have put in place in order to allow the natural expansion of the model.