Heavyweight or lightweight: a process selection guide for developing grid software

ABSTRACT

Along with the advances in wide-area network technologies and computer hardware, the increasing availability of powerful computers and high speed networks are changing the high performance computing paradigm today. Recent related research has led to the emergence of a new paradigm known as grid computing. A major motivation of grid computing is to aggregate the power of widely distributed resources to provide services to users. Several unique characteristics of this paradigm make the development of grid software more challenging. In order to develop grid-aware applications, software engineering principles (e.g. software process, life-cycle model) for building conventional software must be adopted to cope with these challenges. Nowadays two kinds of software processes are frequently mentioned: heavyweight and lightweight. In this paper, we address the issues of comparing the two kinds of processes and selecting the better one for developing grid software. We choose to examine two well-known software processes: IEEE 1074 [6] and Extreme Programming [1], which respectively represents heavyweight process and lightweight process. They are first examined in detail and a comparison between them is conducted. Then we present a selection guide to choose the better methodology for a grid software project. Our analysis shows that lightweight software processes such as XP are more suitable for developing grid software.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

General Terms:
Human Factors, Languages, Management

Keywords:
grid software, process selection, software process