Software Engineering Perspective for Higher Quality Grid Distributed Development

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to investigate the deficiencies of a distributed development process, especially a grid middleware software development and to propose some useful software engineering practices that will improve its quality. Considering that the distributed development approach is very useful for developing complex grid systems and scientific software, reducing the errors in the development process and improving its quality is a challenging problem for software engineers. Concerning to show the possible deficiencies which usually result in delay of the entire project or in the unsuccessful integration of the processes we consider the European Middleware Initiative (EMI) as our case study. Also, we found some specific problems that occur during the development of the two versions of the EMI products. That helped us to discover the reasons for those problems and to suggest some formal and standardized software engineering practices that will enhance the distributed and the grid middleware development process.