Requirements Engineering for Scientific Computing: A Model-Based Approach

Abstract

Requirements engineering is crucial to the success of software development. However, in many scientific computing projects, traditional requirements engineering practices are ignored. We claim that there is a need for methodologies, which help capturing and managing requirements for these projects, to collaboratively develop scientific software with greater interoperability. We propose a model-based approach to elicit and manage requirements in scientific computing projects. The proposed approach is based on a meta-model in order to deal with the high complexity and frequent change in scientific software development. The meta-model also provides abstractions and notations targeted at scientific computing projects. The approach supports requirements engineering in these projects with the flexibility of easily managing requirements versioning, trace ability and communication across the boundary of disciplines. A tool prototype is implemented. To evaluate the proposed approach, we applied it in scientific computing projects. The approach has showed its advantages in the application and promotes software engineering in these projects.