Engineering the Software for Understanding Climate Change
Climate scientists build large, complex simulations with little or no software engineering training, and do not readily adopt the latest software engineering tools and techniques. In this paper, we describe an ethnographic study of the culture and practices of climate scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre. The study examined how the scientists think about software correctness, how they prioritize requirements, and how they develop a shared understanding of their models. The findings show that climate scientists have developed customized techniques for verification and validation that are tightly integrated into their approach to scientific research. Their software practices share many features of both agile and open source projects, in that they rely on self-organisation of the teams, extensive use of informal communication channels, and developers who are also users and domain experts. These comparisons offer insights into why such practices work.
Speaker Details
Steve Easterbrook is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in Computing from Imperial College in London (UK), in 1991, on the topic of requirements negotiation for complex socio-technical systems analysis. His first faculty position was at the School of Cognitive and Computing Science, University of Sussex, where he co-designed and was the first course director for a new degree program in Human-Centered Software Design.In 1995 he moved to the US to lead the research team at NASA´s Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Facility in West Virginia, where he investigated software verification on the Space Shuttle Flight Software, the International Space Station, the Earth Observation System, and several planetary probes. He moved to the University of Toronto in 1999, where he now teaches courses in empirical research methods, software engineering, and requirements analysis. Since 2006, he has been developing a new research program in Climate Change Informatics, to explore how ideas from systems analysis and computational thinking can be applied to meet the many challenges posed by global warming.
- Date:
- Speakers:
- Steve Easterbrook
- Affiliation:
- University of Toronto, Canada
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Jeff Running
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