Cultural Barriers to Software Productivity Practices at Los Alamos
It addresses cultural challenges in software adoption for a specific domain (nuclear weapons research), but is incremental as it focuses on describing differences rather than proposing solutions.
The paper investigated barriers to adopting modern software productivity practices in the nuclear weapons program at Los Alamos National Laboratory, finding that cultural differences between physics and computer science communities were significant obstacles.
In recent years, code projects in the nuclear weapons program at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) have given increased attention to modern software productivity practices. We found that some of the biggest barriers to adoption of new practices were not technical but cultural. This paper describes several of the cultural differences between the physics and computer science communities at LANL.