Mark Webb

When not waiting for trains (see http://rtti.nationalrail.co.uk/3010/06/06.htm http://rtti.nationalrail.co.uk/3008/11/11.htm), I work for a government agency as a SoftwareEngineer in the ClimateResearch? field, or possibly as a ClimateScientist? in the SoftwareEngineering field.

I have spent much of the last two years working in a technical manager/customer role on the implementation of a data storage system, developed and run by external contractors. I have experimented with applying some of the principles of XP in managing the relationship with our contractors, which has, I believe, yielded real benefits. We have also experienced problems and delays in nailing down various service integrity issues that I believe would have been hard to prevent even if the project had been run with the contractor team applying XP to the hilt.

I am interested in seeing how the benefits of XP and other AgileMethodologies can be realized as far as possible in scientific organizations where the need to handle large data volumes and expensive computer models (mostly written in FORTRAN) efficiently is often seen as being in tension with the benefits of reusability and maintainability associated with ObjectOrientedProgramming.

I am now working on a new project to investigate the impact that changing various assumptions in ClimateModels? has on the model predictions of ClimateChange?. Technically, this will involve running large ensembles of model simulations on a Linux PC cluster, which is a bit of a departure from the CRAY T3E supercomputing platform we currently use for most of our climate simulations.

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