Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) software supports a wide variety of domains including nuclear physics, crash simulation, satellite data processing, fluid dynamics, climate modeling, bioinformatics, and vehicle development. The increase in the importance of CSE software motivates the need to identify and understand appropriate software engineering (SE) practices for CSE. Because of the uniqueness of CSE software development, existing SE tools and techniques developed for the business/IT community are often not efficient or effective. Appropriate SE solutions must account for the salient characteristics of the CSE development environment. This situation creates an opportunity for members of the SE community to interact with members of the CSE community to address this need. This workshop facilitates that collaboration by bringing together members of the SE community and the CSE community to share perspectives and present findings from research and practice relevant to CSE software. A significant portion of the workshop is devoted to focused interaction among the participants with the goal of generating a research agenda to improve tools, techniques, and experimental methods for studying CSE software engineering.

There are many ideas in software design that are considered good practice. However, research is still needed to validate their contributions to software maintenance. This paper presents a method for examining software systems that have been actively maintained and used over the long term and are potential candidates for yielding lessons about design. The method relies on a criterion of stability and a definition of distance to flag design characteristics that have potentially contributed to long-term maintainability. It is demonstrated by application to an example of long-lived scientific software. The results from this demonstration show that the method can provide insight into the relative importance of individual elements of a set of design characteristics for the long-term evolution of software

Abstract Software inspections are an intensely people‐centric activity. Even though this is routinely recognized in industry, much of the research focuses on inspection mechanics. During three years of inspection experiments, even though the main purpose of the experiments was to investigate the effectiveness of a particular technique, the inspectors involved provided broad comments on many other aspects of inspections. Their comments were collected and organized into themes. These themes are presented here as a set of maxims that cover all the topics that the inspectors felt were important as they endeavoured to do good inspections. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.