Quality-Aware Academic Research Tool Development

Many organizations have adopted several different kinds of commercial software tools for the purpose of developing quality software, reducing time-to-market, and automating labor intensive and error-prone tasks. Academic researchers have also developed various types of tools, primarily as a means toward providing a prototype reference implementation that corresponds to some new research concept. In addition, academic researchers also use the tool building task itself as a mechanism for students to learn and practice various software engineering principles (e.g., requirements management, design, implementation, testing, configuration management, and release management) from building the tools. Although some academic tools have been developed with observance of sound software engineering practices, most academic research tool development still remains an ad hoc process because tools tend to be developed quickly and without much consideration for quality. In this paper, we present several quality factors to be considered when developing software tools for academic research purposes. We also present a survey of tools that have been presented at major conferences to examine the status quo of academic research tool development in terms of these factors.