Effective Software Practices To Leverage Software Development Process in Sand-Control Engineering Software-A Case Study

摘要

The quest by E&P companies and their service providersto gain a competitive edge through technology is drivinga demand for higher standards in engineering software.Time to market is a critical success factor and is oftenviewed as contradictory to higher standards and otherfactors such as limited resources and budgets. Anoptimum approach to engineering software developmentcan successfully satisfy both time-to-market andbudgetary requirements while continually raisingstandards.This paper will discuss software practices that haveproven effective during a full oilfield engineering softwareapplication development life cycle. Although the processactivities – including specification, design, development,testing and deployment – were conventional, they weresequenced in a non-conventional manner andaugmented with techniques such as risk management,use cases analysis, software modeling and configurationmanagement.The paper presents a case study that illustrates howthese practices were used in a sand control engineeringsoftware development project to successfully design andremodel an existing horizontal gravel pack spreadsheetapplication into a standalone desktop application. Thenew application provides a user-friendly interface todesign and analyze gravel transport for solids of varyingdensity in Newtonian fluids. A computation engine wasdeveloped as a plug-in component to perform variouscomputations during the gravel packing process. Anobject-oriented architecture and framework weredesigned and built to avoid having to rebuild every newapplication from scratch. The authors will explain howthe system was built and extended to incorporate newcapabilities and how adopting optimized developmentpractices has enabled reuse of software components innew applications and increased both the standards andcost-effectiveness of engineering software development.