Self-Perceptions about Software Engineering: A Survey of Scientists and Engineers

Scientists and engineers devote considerable effort to developing large, complex codes to solve important problems. However, while they often develop useful code, many scientists and engineers are frequently unaware of how various software engineering practices can help them write better code. This article presents the results of a survey on this topic.

Knowing what you don't Know

As a specific example of this knowledge problem, Roscoe Bartlett (one of the authors), who comes from the chemical engineering and applied math wing of the computational science and engineering (CSE) community personally experienced “not knowing what he did not know” regarding the use of SE on his projects. He observed the same problem in many of his CSE colleagues.