Challenges for Verifying and Validating Scientific Software in Computational Materials Science
This work addresses trust and reliability issues in scientific software for computational materials science researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing concerns without introducing new methods.
The paper investigates the impact of quality assurance in computational materials science, identifying challenges for verifying and validating scientific software and proposing future research directions to address these issues.
Many fields of science rely on software systems to answer different research questions. For valid results researchers need to trust the results scientific software produces, and consequently quality assurance is of utmost importance. In this paper we are investigating the impact of quality assurance in the domain of computational materials science (CMS). Based on our experience in this domain we formulate challenges for validation and verification of scientific software and their results. Furthermore, we describe directions for future research that can potentially help dealing with these challenges.