More focused software engineering for scientific communities

The major challenge for introducing and expanding the software engineering practices in the scientific communities is what can be perceived as divergent goals. While software engineering tends to focus on for example Readability and Maintainability of code, scientists are much more focused on shorter write times and faster results. The very processes that are placed to improve on the software engineering practices are thus occasionally circumvented or at the least considered a nuisance. Scientists are also regularly asked to place higher priority on code rewrite for adopting better coding methods, newer packages or making room for new platform support, which from their perspective would not lead to scientific results in the short term.

The reasoning behind adoption of RSE is obvious to those with long experience in the field. We need to clarify what scientists can gain and how we can adapt software engineering methodology to accommodate their goals.

To that end some suggested talking points for this session could include:

1. How to clarify the cost benefit of applying software engineering methods to scientific communities? As well as funding agencies allowing for adding expert SE to a project.
2. How to quickly introduce young scientists to software engineering without slowing down their master or doctoral progress?
3. How to address the missing Dev stage of code development, where much of the written code goes from research directly into operations? DevOps is a luxury, scientific communities do ResOps.
4. How can Co-Design of middleware and next gen prototypes become more beneficial to scientific communities in the short run?

In short, part of RSE focuses on getting researchers to adopt software engineering. The intention from the suggested topic is to reverse it by asking how software engineering can further understand and adapt to researchers needs beyond simple tooling.

Session chair(s)

• Salem El Sayed, Forschungszentrum Jülich

Time

Thu., Sep. 28 11:00 - 12:30

Room

Workshop B