This is a time of great growth at the intersection of software engineering and scientific software. The 1st and 2nd International Conference of Research Software Engineers took place in Manchester, UK. Companies are already heavily invested in the application of software engineering practices on scientific software (e.g. Microsoft Research Agile Projects team, Mathworks, Tessella, and NAG). 

Despite its importance, the development of scientific software historically has attracted less attention from the software engineering community than other subdomains have. Indeed, the development of research software is significantly different than the development of business information systems, from which many of the software engineering best practices, tools and techniques have been drawn. Rather than drawing on each others' experience, the two communities can often seem in conflict. Additionally, the majority of published software engineering studies focus on industry or open source software projects rather than scientific software projects. As a result, software engineering research is often seen as unhelpful or useless to those developing scientific software, or indeed software in general, which is detrimental to the long-term production of reliable, reproducible and reusable scientific software.