The development process used by academic researchers often seems unsystematic. A Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is seldom considered, commenting is scarce, and external documentation consists of erasure marks left on whiteboards. Configuration management is paid lip-service, but is not standard practice. This paper examines reasons behind the apparent large-scale non-adoption of software engineering in academic research. The effects where it was adopted are examined. Finally, we present an SDLC designed for the academic research environment.

See the full paper, see the conference presentation.

Full citation: Andre Oboler, David McG. Squire and Kevin B. Korb, Why don’t we practice what we teach? Engineering Software for Computer Science Research in Academia, In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Software Engineering Research and Applications (ICSERA’03), San Francisco, USA, pp. 25-30, 25-27 June 2003.
You can also download the presentation slides