Software Quality in Science

[Jerry <lanceboyle@qwest.net>]

Here is an interesting article on software quality in science:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/05/science-climate-emails-code-release

From the article:

"There is enough evidence for us to regard a lot of scientific
software with worry. For example Professor Les Hatton, an
international expert in software testing resident in the Universities
of Kent and Kingston, carried out an extensive analysis of several
million lines of scientific code. He showed that the software had an
unacceptably high level of detectable inconsistencies.

"For example, interface inconsistencies between software modules which
pass data from one part of a program to another occurred at the rate
of one in every seven interfaces on average in the programming
language Fortran, and one in every 37 interfaces in the language C.
This is hugely worrying when you realise that just one error — just
one — will usually invalidate a computer program. What he also
discovered, even more worryingly, is that the accuracy of results
declined from six significant figures to one significant figure during
the running of programs.

"Hatton and other researchers' work indicates that scientific software
is often of poor quality. What is staggering about the research that
has been done is that it examines commercial scientific software –
produced by software engineers who have to undergo a regime of
thorough testing, quality assurance and a change control discipline
known as configuration management.

"By contrast scientific software developed in our universities and
research institutes is often produced by scientists with no training
in software engineering and with no quality mechanisms in place and
so, no doubt, the occurrence of errors will be even higher."


For several years, I have used Ada for as much of my engineering
research as I can, having switched from Pascal and having dumped
FORTRAN many years ago (although it was my first language). Ada offers
the same advantages in this application as in other applications.
However, in my experience, Ada is hampered by having limited support
for standard and popular libraries such as the GNU Scientific Library.
(Feel free to add your own favorite library which is not supported by
Ada.)

Jerry