HydroShare: Applying professional software engineering to a new NSF-funded large software project

HydroShare is an online, collaborative system being developed for sharing hydrologic data and models as part of the NSF\u27s Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) program (NSF collaborative award numbers 1148453 and 1148090). HydroShare involves a large software development effort requiring cooperative research and distributed software development between domain scientists, professional software engineers (here \u27professional\u27 denotes previous commercial experience in the application of modern software engineering), and university software developers. HydroShare expands upon the data sharing capabilities of the Hydrologic Information System of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, Inc. (CUAHSI) by broadening the classes of data accommodated, expanding capability to include the sharing of models and model components, and taking advantage of emerging social media functionality to enhance information about and collaboration around hydrologic data and models. With a goal of enabling better science concomitant with improved sustainable software practices, we will describe our approach, experiences, and lessons learned thus-far in applying professional software engineering to a large NSF-funded software project from the project\u27s onset