Validating the Need to Validate Code
DOI: 10.1063/1.4797173
The problems that concern Post and Votta were encountered decades ago in commercial software development and have been solved.
A familiar result is Microsoft’s Windows operating system, a product of more than 20 years’ work by thousands of people. It now consists of more than 200 million lines of source code. At a smaller but no less impressive scale are numerical analysis programs from such companies as MSC, ABAQUS, Mentor, ANSYS, Dassault, and ALGOR. These firms’ codes are commonly used to design bridges, automobiles, networks, buildings, and airplanes. Their development has presented exactly the set of issues Post and Votta describe.
Commercial efforts revolve around solid discipline and management. Perhaps for computational scientists that would qualify as a new paradigm; for software engineers it has become standard practice.
More about the Authors
Craig Bolon. (cbolon@verizon.net) Planwright Systems Corporation, Brookline, Massachusetts, US .
