On Patterns of Multi-domain Interaction for Scientific Software Development focused on Separation of Concerns

This year’s ICCS conference theme promotes the use of computational science as a means to foster multidisciplinarity and synergies with other fields. Our thesis is that this trend towards multidisciplinarity should be accompanied by the use of best practices issued from the software engineering community in order to avoid obtaining overly complex and tangled code, difficult to validate, to maintain and to port. In this paper we argue for the need of applying separation of concerns principles when the development involves scientists from various application fields. We overview several strategies that may be used to achieve this separation, focusing mainly on two approaches drawn from our previous experiences with multidisciplinary projects, addressing two distinct patterns of multi-domain interaction that may occur in scientific software development.