A Light-weight Model for Small Scientific Software Teams

This paper focuses on a simple, lightweight model with tools and practices to help small scientific software teams introduce structure and process to their management efforts. We emphasize a handful of tools and practices we have found to be broadly useful.  This model has been used and evolved as part of the author’s student research efforts at St. John’s University.

The model, tools and practices described here can be useful for large teams, too. Often large teams are composed of small teams, so these practices can be applied at the small team level and applied similarly to cross-team leadership as a group. Furthermore, team policy becomes even more important on large teams, as do lightweight communication strategies such as project Kanban boards where the status of activities can be referenced asynchronously via online tools.