2 research outputs found
Talk to Me: A Case Study on Coordinating Expertise in Large-Scale Scientific Software Projects
Large-scale collaborative scientific software projects require more knowledge
than any one person typically possesses. This makes coordination and
communication of knowledge and expertise a key factor in creating and
safeguarding software quality, without which we cannot have sustainable
software. However, as researchers attempt to scale up the production of
software, they are confronted by problems of awareness and understanding. This
presents an opportunity to develop better practices and tools that directly
address these challenges. To that end, we conducted a case study of developers
of the Trilinos project. We surveyed the software development challenges
addressed and show how those problems are connected with what they know and how
they communicate. Based on these data, we provide a series of practicable
recommendations, and outline a path forward for future research.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication at 9th International
Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences
(WSSSPE6.1
Characterizing the Roles of Contributors in Open-source Scientific Software Projects
The development of scientific software is, more than ever, critical to the
practice of science, and this is accompanied by a trend towards more open and
collaborative efforts. Unfortunately, there has been little investigation into
who is driving the evolution of such scientific software or how the
collaboration happens. In this paper, we address this problem. We present an
extensive analysis of seven open-source scientific software projects in order
to develop an empirically-informed model of the development process. This
analysis was complemented by a survey of 72 scientific software developers. In
the majority of the projects, we found senior research staff (e.g. professors)
to be responsible for half or more of commits (an average commit share of 72%)
and heavily involved in architectural concerns (seniors were more likely to
interact with files related to the build system, project meta-data, and
developer documentation). Juniors (e.g.graduate students) also contribute
substantially -- in one studied project, juniors made almost 100% of its
commits. Still, graduate students had the longest contribution periods among
juniors (with 1.72 years of commit activity compared to 0.98 years for postdocs
and 4 months for undergraduates). Moreover, we also found that third-party
contributors are scarce, contributing for just one day for the project. The
results from this study aim to help scientists to better understand their own
projects, communities, and the contributors' behavior, while paving the road
for future software engineering researchComment: 12 page