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Towards test driven development for computational science with pFUnit
| Content Provider | ACM Digital Library |
|---|---|
| Author | Rilee, Michael Clune, Thomas |
| Abstract | Developers working in Computational Science & Engineering (CSE)/High Performance Computing (HPC) must contend with constant change due to advances in computing technology and science. Test Driven Development (TDD) is a methodology that mitigates software development risks due to change at the cost of adding comprehensive and continuous testing to the development process. Testing frameworks tailored for CSE/HPC, like pFUnit, can lower the barriers to such testing, yet CSE software faces unique constraints foreign to the broader software engineering community. Effective testing of numerical software requires a comprehensive suite of oracles, i.e., use cases with known answers, as well as robust estimates for the unavoidable numerical errors associated with implementation with finite-precision arithmetic. At first glance these concerns often seem exceedingly challenging or even insurmountable for real-world scientific applications. However, we argue that this common perception is incorrect and driven by (1) a conflation between model validation and software verification and (2) the general tendency in the scientific community to develop relatively coarse-grained, large procedures that compound numerous algorithmic steps. We believe TDD can be applied routinely to numerical software if developers pursue fine-grained implementations that permit testing, neatly side-stepping concerns about needing nontrivial oracles as well as the accumulation of errors. We present an example of a successful, complex legacy CSE/HPC code whose development process shares some aspects with TDD, which we contrast with current and potential capabilities. A mix of our proposed methodology and framework support should enable everyday use of TDD by CSE-expert developers. |
| Starting Page | 20 |
| Ending Page | 27 |
| Page Count | 8 |
| File Format | |
| ISBN | 9781479970353 |
| DOI | 10.1109/SE-HPCCSE.2014.5 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
| Publisher Date | 2014-11-16 |
| Access Restriction | Subscribed |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
