Software Reuse Within the Earth Science Community

Abstract

Abstract-Scientific missions in the Earth sciences frequently require cost-effective, highly reliable, and easy-to-use software, which can be a challenge for software developers to provide. The NASA Earth Science Enterprise (ESE) spends a significant amount of resources developing software components and other software development artifacts that may also be of value if reused in other projects requiring similar functionality. In general, software reuse is often defined as utilizing existing software artifacts. Software reuse can improve productivity and quality while decreasing the cost of software development, as documented by case studies in the literature. Since large software systems are often the results of the integration of many smaller and sometimes reusable components, ensuring reusability of such software components becomes a necessity. Indeed, designing software components with reusability as a requirement can increase the software reuse potential within a communitysuch as the NASA ESE community. The NASA Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) Software ReuseWorking Group is chartered to oversee the development of a process that will maximize the reuse potential of existing software components while recommending strategies for maximizing the reusability potential of yet-to-be-designed components. As part of this work, two surveys of the Earth science community were conducted. The first was performed in 2004 and distributed among government employees and contractors. A follow-up survey was performed in 2005 and distributed among a wider community, to include members of industry and academia. The surveys were designed to collect information on subjects such as the current software reuse practices of Earth science software developers, why they choose to reuse software, and what perceived barriers prevent them from reusing software.In this paper, we compare the results of these surveys, summarize the observed trends, and discuss the findings. The results are very similar, with the second, larger survey confirming the basic results of the first, smaller survey. The results suggest that reuse of ESE software can drive down the cost and time of system development, increase flexibility and responsiveness of these systems to new technologies and requirements, and increase effective and accountable community participation.

Progress towards a NASA earth science Reuse Enablement System (RES)

“…The intention was to provide one place for Earth science software developers to go in order to find reusable software assets. This would help break down some major barriers to software reuse within the community as identified in surveys conducted by the WG [1]. However, as indicated in Section 5, recent direction from NASA Headquarters [14] has indicated that new missions could benefit from the implementation of a set of distributed systems, run on a per-mission basis.…”

“…The WG's original vision of a centralized RES was partially based on the results of surveys of the community of Earth science software developers [1]. These surveys revealed barriers to reuse, including that many people did not practice software reuse either because they did not know reusable assets existed or because they did not know where to locate reusable assets.…”

“…Both studies returned near-identical results. In particular, the WG found that the Earth science community could benefit from the availability of a system that describes and provides access to Earth science software and applications that are available for reuse [1]. As a result, the WG submitted the following recommendations to NASA [2] Based on the conclusions of a technology evaluation, NASA should implement a reuse criablement system (RES).…”

Relevance of software reuse in building advanced scientific data processing systems

“…Open source software reuse also offers benefits for the Earth science data systems development community (Ramamurthy 2006). Research has shown that while much reuse is done by word of mouth through personal knowledge and connections (Marshall et al 2006), repositories and catalogs of reusable software and other components are also used and considered important sources for increasing systematic reuse.…”

Software reuse methods to improve technological infrastructure for e-Science

“…Alphabetically, they are "documentation, extensibility, intellectual property issues, modularity, packaging, portability, standards compliance, support, and verification and testing" [16]. Each of the topic areas was selected based on its potential use for assessing the reuse maturity of software assets.…”