Customized project charter for computational scientific software products

Different domains of software applications require that the project management’s development process be customized to its specific conditions and needs. One of the most widely used operation research is the development of a scientific software product. Numerous studies point to a wide gap among the various communities, processes, dynamics, etc., between the development of general software products and the development of computational scientific software products. This wide gap emphasizes the necessity for more suitable and more adjustable practices in project management and in the development of scientific software products. One of the most significant challenges in the development of scientific software is expressed in the different attitudes and expectations held by various stakeholders, in terms of the scope, objectives, and goals they envision for their software product. Although unique challenges in the development of scientific software arise at every stage of the process, we maintain that, by addressing the varying perspectives gap at the very outset of the project management process, one can reduce unwanted dynamics throughout the development process. A “project charter” is a critical formal statement that defines the scope, objectives and participants in a project in order to officially authorize the project and to ensure that everyone involved is aware of its purpose and objectives. Customization of the project charter can provide a response to the varying perspectives gap. This paper presents an approach to the generation of a customized project charter for scientific software products as an initial and essential step for the achievement of quality. We will demonstrate the implementation of the approach in one of our own scientific software development projects – a simulation software product used for the development of a fiber optic evanescent wave spectroscopy (FEWS) simulator.