Summary of the First Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE1)

Abstract

Challenges related to development, deployment, and maintenance of reusable software for science are becoming a growing concern. Many scientists' research increasingly depends on the quality and availability of software upon which their works are built. To highlight some of these issues and share experiences, the First Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE1) was held in November 2013 in conjunction with the SC13 Conference. The workshop featured keynote presentations and a large number (54) of solicited extended abstracts that were grouped into three themes and presented via panels. A set of collaborative notes of the presentations and discussion was taken during the workshop. Unique perspectives were captured about issues such as comprehensive documentation, development and deployment practices, software licenses and career paths for developers. Attribution systems that account for evidence of software contribution and impact were also discussed. These include mechanisms such as Digital Object Identifiers, publication of "software papers", and the use of online systems, for example source code repositories like GitHub. This paper summarizes the issues and shared experiences that were discussed, including cross-cutting issues and use cases. It joins a nascent literature seeking to understand what drives software work in science, and how it is impacted by the reward systems of science. These incentives can determine the extent to which developers are motivated to build software for the long-term, for the use of others, and whether to work collaboratively or separately. It also explores community building, leadership, and dynamics in relation to successful scientific software.

Report on the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2)

“…The group took the position of viewing sustainability from the perspective of addressing the challenges related to the development, deployment, and maintenance of reusable software [2]. The principal focus of the initial discussion considered how to foster cultural change towards developing sustainable software in academic environments.…”

MINRES-QLP Pack and Reliable Reproducible Research via Supportable Scientific Software

“…She also thanks Fred Hickernell for introducing her to Doctest [31], co-developing the definition of SSS and the principles of RRR via SSS during the development of GAIL [10,11] and the course Reliable Mathematical Software [29]. The author is thankful for the comments and feedback for an earlier version of this work from the reviewers of the JORS and the First Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science [35,36].…”

“…After the course, a master student completed her thesis and five doctoral students are developing research papers following the principles of RRR via SSS. In addition, we serve the computational community by organizing a two-session minisymposium "Reliable Computational Science" in the upcoming SIAM Annual Meeting 2014 (http://meetings.siam.org/program.cfm?CONFCODE=AN14) and co-authoring a comprehensive summary report for WSSSPE1 [35,36].…”

“…Principles and novel ideas behind the research work would ideally be propagated in beginning and advanced courses in scientific computing, whereas the practices of engineering supportable software promoted to computational scientists and researchers through workshops such as WSSSPE [35,36] To this end, we started an experimental seminar course, "Reliable Mathematical Software" (IIT MATH-573) [29] in our home institution. We drew teaching materials from exemplary mathematical software such as Chebfun (http://www2.maths.ox.ac.uk/chebfun).…”

The Challenge and Promise of Software Citation for Credit, Identification, Discovery, and Reuse

“…Multiple organizations, including the WSSSPE Software Credit working group [Katz et al, 2014[Katz et al, , 2016a and FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group [Smith et al, 2016], are working to standardize software citation practices. Some of the observations and recommendations made here come from their efforts, which follow similar work by DataCite and the FORCE11 Data Citation Synthesis Group [2014] to standardize research data citation practices.…”