Thematic Domain Analysis for Ocean Modeling

TL;DR

This paper uses thematic analysis of interviews to understand the development and maintenance challenges of ocean models, aiming to improve software engineering practices in ocean science.

Contribution

It presents a qualitative analysis of developer requirements and impediments in ocean modeling, highlighting areas for methodological improvements.

Findings

Identified key developer requirements for ocean model development.

Revealed common impediments to model evolution and maintenance.

Suggested integration of software engineering methods into ocean modeling.

Abstract

Ocean science is a discipline that employs ocean models as an essential research asset. Such scientific modeling provides mathematical abstractions of real-world systems, e.g., the oceans. These models are then coded as implementations of the mathematical abstractions. The developed software systems are called models of the real-world system. To advance the state in engineering such ocean models, we intend to better understand how ocean models are developed and maintained in ocean science. In this paper, we present the results of semi-structured interviews and the Thematic Analysis~(TA) of the interview results to analyze the domain of ocean modeling. Thereby, we identified developer requirements and impediments to model development and evolution, and related themes. This analysis can help to understand where methods from software engineering should be introduced and which challenges need to be addressed. We suggest that other researchers extend and repeat our TA with model developers and research software engineers working in related domains to further advance our knowledge and skills in scientific modeling.