Determining factors that affect long-term evolution in scientific application software

One of the characteristics of scientific application software is its long lifetime of active maintenance. There has been little software engineering research into the development characteristics of scientific software and into the factors that support its successful long evolution. The research described in this paper introduces a novel model to examine the nature of change that influenced an example of industrial scientific software over its lifetime. The research uses the model to provide an objective analysis of factors that contributed to long-term evolution of the software system. Conclusions suggest that the architectural design of the software and the characteristics of the software development group played a major role in the successful evolution of the software. The novel model of change and the research method developed for this study are independent of the type of software under study.