DANSE is an organization of university faculty, funded by the NSF, to build software for interpreting data from national labs. The users of the software are scientists who use the national neutron facilities, neutron scientists, and some are interested in developing new software using tools from DANSE. This mix of stakeholders presents management challenges.

The management structure is shown in the figure, including the five scientific subfields and subproject leaders. Many software developers in the DANSE project are also end users of the software. This reduces the risk of misunderstanding requirements, and allows for more rapid evaluation of prototypes and concepts. Most of these scientist/developers have not had prior experience with software development in a large project, and procedures have been developed to review concepts, designs, code, and release products such as documentation. Very briefly, the DANSE development practices are best described as agile and focused on the end product, but with periodic reviews and oversight by the software architect and project manager. Coordination of tasks is done through a ticketing system in trac, which is linked to our subversion software repository.