A Case Study: Test-Driven Development in a Microscopy Image-Processing Project
Aziz Nanthaamornphong · 2016
Many scientific software developers have applied software engineering practices to their work in recent years. Agile methods are gaining increased interest from both industry and research fields, including scientific application domains. Test-driven development (TDD) and refactoring practices are critical for the success of agile methods. Although many scientific projects employ agile practices, the effect of TDD on scientific software development remains unknown and should thus be investigated. The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of using TDD to develop scientific software in a high-performance-computing (HPC) environment. The results show that the TDD provides both advantages and disadvantages in a parallel computing environment. In particular, developers face problems when writing tests and there is a lack of software engineering practices.