Reiner Jung

Reiner Jung, Sven Gundlach, Wilhelm Hasselbring

Ocean science is a discipline that employs ocean models as an essential research asset. Such scientific modeling provides mathematical abstractions of real-world systems, e.g., the oceans. These models are then coded as implementations of the mathematical abstractions. The developed software systems are called models of the real-world system. To advance the state in engineering such ocean models, we intend to better understand how ocean models are developed and maintained in ocean science. In this paper, we present the results of semi-structured interviews and the Thematic Analysis~(TA) of the interview results to analyze the domain of ocean modeling. Thereby, we identified developer requirements and impediments to model development and evolution, and related themes. This analysis can help to understand where methods from software engineering should be introduced and which challenges need to be addressed. We suggest that other researchers extend and repeat our TA with model developers and research software engineers working in related domains to further advance our knowledge and skills in scientific modeling.

Reiner Jung, Sven Gundlach, Wilhelm Hasselbring

Scientific modeling provides mathematical abstractions of real-world systems and builds software as implementations of these mathematical abstractions. Ocean science is a multidisciplinary discipline developing scientific models and simulations as ocean system models that are an essential research asset. In software engineering and information systems research, modeling is also an essential activity. In particular, business process modeling for business process management and systems engineering is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current process may be analyzed, improved, and automated. In this paper, we employ process modeling for analyzing scientific software development in ocean science to advance the state in engineering of ocean system models and to better understand how ocean system models are developed and maintained in ocean science. We interviewed domain experts in semi-structured interviews, analyzed the results via thematic analysis, and modeled the results via the business process modeling notation BPMN. The processes modeled as a result describe an aspired state of software development in the domain, which are often not (yet) implemented. This enables existing processes in simulation-based system engineering to be improved with the help of these process models.

Andreas Brunnert, Andre van Hoorn, Felix Willnecker et al.

DevOps is a trend towards a tighter integration between development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams. The need for such an integration is driven by the requirement to continuously adapt enterprise applications (EAs) to changes in the business environment. As of today, DevOps concepts have been primarily introduced to ensure a constant flow of features and bug fixes into new releases from a functional perspective. In order to integrate a non-functional perspective into these DevOps concepts this report focuses on tools, activities, and processes to ensure one of the most important quality attributes of a software system, namely performance. Performance describes system properties concerning its timeliness and use of resources. Common metrics are response time, throughput, and resource utilization. Performance goals for EAs are typically defined by setting upper and/or lower bounds for these metrics and specific business transactions. In order to ensure that such performance goals can be met, several activities are required during development and operation of these systems as well as during the transition from Dev to Ops. Activities during development are typically summarized by the term Software Performance Engineering (SPE), whereas activities during operations are called Application Performance Management (APM). SPE and APM were historically tackled independently from each other, but the newly emerging DevOps concepts require and enable a tighter integration between both activity streams. This report presents existing solutions to support this integration as well as open research challenges in this area.