UTILIZING SOFTWARE ENGINEERING TO IMPROVE SOFTWARE PROCESS CAPABILITIES WITHIN THE BIOLOGICAL-ENGINEERING-RESEARCH-UNIT

This paper presents some changes implemented in the Biological Enginee ring Research Unit (BERU) to improve the development and support of so ftware used in our research. BERU uses a diverse collection of compute rs covering everything from hand-held dataloggers to UNIX1 workstation s. Most of our computer efforts are aimed at collecting, storing and a nalyzing research data. Software engineering concepts provide a roadma p to help recognize problems to focus efforts on improvements. The use of data modeling, configuration management, project planning, and ove rsight, quality assurance and other software-related improvements addr essed by the BERU are presented as examples of how software engineerin g can be used to improve research efforts. (C) 1998 Published by Elsev ier Science B.V. All rights reserved.