Software Development at the German Aerospace Center: Role and Status in Practice

Software is an important innovation factor and an integral part of modern research. However, researchers are often faced with challenges in developing software because they do not have the necessary education and skills. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) established its software engineering initiative in 2005 to enable researchers to better meet these challenges. Continuous adaption and improvement of the supportive measures of the initiative require a good understanding of the current role and practice of software development at DLR. Therefore, we conducted a DLR-wide survey on research software development at DLR at the end of 2018. In this paper, we present the results of this survey and identify possible improvements of the software engineering initiative activities. 773 DLR employees completed our survey and provided information about their academic background, programming experience, and software development practices. The results show that software development is a very relevant topic among the researchers at DLR but also a lack of applying software development best practices. Based on these results we conclude to further enhance the practical focus of our support activities as well as to raise the awareness for these practices to bring them into the daily work of DLR researchers.