Distributed Software Engineering in Collaborative Research Projects

Collaborative research projects involve distributed construction of software prototypes as part of the project methodology. A major challenge thereby is the need to establish a developer community that shall effectively and efficiently align development efforts with requirements offered by researchers and other stakeholders. These projects are inherently different in nature compared to commercial software projects. The literature offers little research on this aspect of software engineering. In this paper, we outline the challenges in this context and present a methodology for distributed software engineering in collaborative research projects. The methodology covers all major aspects of the software engineering process including requirements engineering, architecture, issue tracking, and social aspects of developer community building in collaborative projects. The methodology can be tailored to different project contexts and may provide support in planning software engineering work in future projects.