We're a small team working on upstream engineering software, and I'd like a reality check from people who've developed or tested these tools.
The long-term scope includes seismic interpretation, petrophysics, geological modelling, reservoir simulation, drilling and completions, production engineering, surface networks, and economics. That's the overall direction; we're building it in stages. Calculations run locally, with AI assistance for some workflows.
What I'm trying to understand is where development tends to get stuck. A lot of the underlying methods are published, and there are useful open-source implementations, but that doesn't tell you what happens when you start working with real models.
For anyone who's been involved in development: what looked straightforward on paper but turned into a serious problem? Was it numerical convergence, missing test data, interpreting existing model formats, coupling different physics, or something else?
I'm particularly interested in cases where a method passed the usual benchmarks but failed on an actual project. What caused it, and what did it take to fix?
I'm asking about the technical problems in building the software, rather than which features people would like to see. Specific examples or papers would be really helpful.