J. Yates Monteith
ABSTRACT
In the past 70 years, science research methods have expanded from test tubes and beakers to include simulations in software. Scientific software is produced in a larger environment of collaboration that includes not only software developers, but also scientists who both use and extend the software for their research endeavors. The objective of this research is to understand the factors that promote and inhibit ecosystem formation and sustainment specific to scientific research software development. We have identified a set of relevant problems inhibiting sustainability in the scientific software context, including development, evolution and maintenance, as well as funding and leadership. We have collected data and used existing business, software, and innovation analysis techniques to examine the artifacts from several scientific research projects. We interviewed significant actors in select scientific ecosystems. We describe the differences between scientific software ecosystems and commercial software ecosystems, our initial results from interviews and data analysis, and we provide a set of recommendations and approaches towards handling software sustainability. Data suggests an ecosystem strategy can contribute to the survivability and sustainability of research software; however, such a strategy, which may distract from sustainability, requires thought and effort be given to establishing and nurturing the ecosystem, which in turn distract from the research mission. At this stage these initial results point us to future potentially fruitful investigations.
- J. Brown, M. Knepley, and B. Smith. Run-time extensibility: anything less is unsustainable. Technical Report 791571, WSSSPE1, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.791571.Google Scholar
- J. C. Carver and G. K. Thiruvathukal. Software engineering need not be difficult. Technical Report 830442, WSSSPE1, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.830442.Google Scholar
- G. Chastek and J. D. McGregor. It takes an ecosystem. Systems and Software Technology Conference (SSTC 2012), April 2012.Google Scholar
- N. Chue Hong, B. Hole, and S. Moore. Software papers: improving the reusability and sustainability of scientific software. Technical Report 795303, WSSSPE1, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.795303.Google Scholar
- Eclipse Science Working Group. Eclipse science working group charter. http://science.eclipse.org/charter, May 2014.Google Scholar
- C. R. Ferenbaugh. Experiments in sustainable software practices for future architectures. Technical Report 1309.1428, WSSSPE1, 2013. http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.1428.Google Scholar
- M. Greene. The demise of the lone author. Nature, 450(7173):1165--1165, 2007.Google ScholarCross Ref
- M. Hanwell, A. Perera, W. Turner, P. O'Leary, K. Osterdahl, B. Hoffman, and W. Schroeder. Sustainable software ecosystems for open science. Technical Report 790756, WSSSPE1, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.790756.Google Scholar
- W. Humphrey, A. Dalke, and K. Schulten. Vmd: visual molecular dynamics. Journal of molecular graphics, 14(1):33--38, 1996.Google Scholar
- L. N. Joppa, G. McInerny, R. Harper, L. Salido, K. Takeda, K. O'Hara, D. Gavaghan, and S. Emmott. Troubling trends in scientific software use. Science, 340(6134):814--815, 2013.Google ScholarCross Ref
- D. S. Katz. Citation and attribution of digital products: Social and technological concerns. Technical Report 791606, WSSSPE1, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.791606.Google Scholar
- D. Koop, J. Freire, and C. T. Silva. Enabling reproducible science with VisTrails. Technical Report 1309.1784, WSSSPE1, 2013. http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.1784.Google Scholar
- A. Marsden. Interview with Alison Marsden. Email exchange, May 2014.Google Scholar
- M. Milinkovich. Interview with Mike Milinkovich. Email exchange, June 2014.Google Scholar
- J. Y. Monteith and J. D. McGregor. A three viewpoint model for software ecosystems. In Proceedings of 16th IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications (SEA '12), 2012.Google Scholar
- B. Norris. Software architecture issues in scientific component development. In Applied Parallel Computing. State of the Art in Scientific Computing, pages 629--636. Springer, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. C. Phillips, R. Braun, W. Wang, J. Gumbart, E. Tajkhorshid, E. Villa, C. Chipot, R. D. Skeel, L. Kale, and K. Schulten. Scalable molecular dynamics with namd. Journal of computational chemistry, 26(16):1781--1802, 2005.Google Scholar
- A. Prlić and J. B. Procter. Ten simple rules for the open development of scientific software. PLOS Computational Biology, 8(12), 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002802.Google ScholarCross Ref
- A. Ross. Interview with Andrew Ross. Email exchange, May 2014.Google Scholar
- K. Schulten. Telephone Interview, October 2013. Interview with Klaus Schulten.Google Scholar
- Science Exchange. https://www.scienceexchange.com/, June 2014.Google Scholar
- J. Segal. Models of scientific software development. In First International Workshop on Software Engineering in Computational Science and Engineering, May 2008.Google Scholar
- C. A. Stewart, J. Wernert, E. A. Wernert, W. K. Barnett, and V. Welch. Initial findings from a study of best practices and models for cyberinfrastructure software sustainability. Technical Report 1309.1817, WSSSPE1, 2013. http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.1817.Google Scholar
- V. Stodden and S. Miguez. Best practices for computationan science: Software infrastructure and environments for reproducible and extensible research. Technical Report 2322276, WSSSPE1, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2322276.Google Scholar
- The Apache Software Fondation. Apache incubation policy. http://incubator.apache.org/incubation/Incubation_Policy.html, June 2014.Google Scholar
- The Eclipse Foundation. Incubation phase how-to. http://wiki.eclipse.org/Development_Resources/HOWTO/Incubation_Phase, June 2014.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Scientific Research Software Ecosystems
Recommendations
Software ecosystems: a software ecosystem strategy assessment model
ECSA '10: Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Software Architecture: Companion VolumeSoftware companies and organizations increasingly open up their business to other software companies and as a consequence they find themselves in an ecosystem of software companies, developers and partners. These actors, and especially the software ...
Software Ecosystems: Trends and Impacts on Software Engineering
SBES '12: Proceedings of the 2012 26th Brazilian Symposium on Software EngineeringEconomic and social issues are pointed out as Software Engineering (SE) challenges for the next years, since the field needs to treat issues beyond the technical side. These challenges require analyzing the field of SE from another perspective. In this ...
Software ecosystems architectural health: challenges x practices
ECSAW '16: Proccedings of the 10th European Conference on Software Architecture WorkshopsOver time many software ecosystems have achieved success. Several organizations are opening their software projects for external businesses, creating an multi-organizational government to development their software platform The software architecture has ...
Comments