Software Sustainability in e-Research: Dying for a Change

Editor's Notes

• #2: Abstract: e-Research has come of age - it is no longer a raucous teenager but a young professional. With this comes a greater responsibility for its future, and the requirement to care for the next generation of e-Researchers. In particular, the software which has been developed to support e-Research needs to be properly cultivated otherwise the time and money invested in its development is wasted. With this level of importance placed on software sustainability, it is no surprise that a number of barriers have sprung up around how to achieve it and in particular the requirement to change existing ingrained practices can be hard to sell. Software sustainability in the e-Research community must balance many opposing concerns: the effort spent on maintenance rather than research, conflicting requirements over increasing users, and the ability to enable reproducible and reusable research. This talk will cover the different purposes, benefits and approaches to software preservation and sustainability, looking at common practices and pitfalls, stories and successes as observed by the UK's Software Sustainability Institute.
• #3: However we are faced with new challenges with a direct bearing on the general public, in areas such as environmental change, transport systems, biodiversity, personal health and medicine
• #6: Managed Programme gave money to address gaps Many projects flourished (such as GridSAM, the Application Hosting Environment from RealityGrid and BPEL Designer), but some wilted and faded away.
• #7: 8 projects with multiple international contributors through SF/CPAN/PyPl
• #8: With the SSI we have reached a new stage where we are working to support all the current gardeners who are already out there. So, why do we still need this?
• #9: JournalTOCS largest collection of TOCs from major publication
• #10: Even those who create prototypes will assume they will rewrite the software
• #11: Facts: Average length of time Software development taught to different people Chef analogy Not everyone becomes a master chef, but you need everyone in the kitchen to make the restaurant work Examples from software: Technical authorities Architects Audience exercises: Design patterns Development Models
• #12: Statistics from Greg Wilson Are academics software developers? Can research consortia manage production? Are timing constraints different? What is the role of the PI in software development management? Are the skills for software and research the same?
• #13: Facts: Average length of time to become an architect: 7 years Average length of time Software development taught to different people Chef analogy Not everyone becomes a master chef, but you need everyone in the kitchen to make the restaurant work Examples from software: Technical authorities Architects Audience exercises: Design patterns Development Models
• #14: No one sets out to make a bad piece of software
• #15: Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (Hedy Lamarr) originally using a piano roll, Nikola Tesla for controlling boats
• #16: The main point is that apart from relatively straightforward HCI-type usability there is not much that social scientists have come up with that is practically useful for technologists. The solutions IMHO lies in a more routine involvement of people with social science skills (not social scientists themselves) in design work, which probably requires us to develop career structures for people with hybrid skills. There are some wonderful examples of how this can help to address some of the issues we talk about in the paper, going back to the work we did with Marina Jirotka on eDiaMoND (as a both a positive and a negative example) and is also present in the work of Monika Buscher from Lancaster.IMDB Flickr, seti@home->boinc
• #18: Is it more important to sustain the software that this workflow references, or the workflow itself?
• #19: Is it more important to sustain the software used to create this map, or the data that makes it available? The map is unique and only useful for one point.
• #20: This story has an unhappy end – the Kongo Gumi temple builders went bust in 2006 bringing to an end the longest running family business in the world (est 568!)
• #23: The ancient Pharoah’s of Egypt believed that they could preserve the physical manifestations of their lives and so enter into the eternal afterlife as God Both mummies are held in the British museum.
• #24: The so called curse of the pharoah’s is said to have killed those that disturbed the Pharoahs’ sleep However the curse might be better applied to the Pharoah himself, as eternal decay is not the same as eternal life.
• #25: Storage lifetime of an apple is ~12 months, which is about the same as software! Purposes for software preservations Achieve legal compliance Create heritage value Enable continued access to data Encourage software reuse Manage systems and services
• #28: Scott McNealy coined the phrase
• #32: How does software sustainability fit within context of software engineering, community engagement, project management, funding What are the external factors like change in effort, timelines and deadlines, licensing, step changes in product development
• #35: Tools –Signal Data Explorer (SDE) 􀂄We developed SDE which is now being used: 􀂄In CARMEN –neuroscience tools and data sharing 􀂄In BROADEN and in Rolls-Royce 􀂄We exploited SDE through Cybula Ltd. 􀂄Being used on trains 􀂄Started to sell out of the box system
• #36: CAStep: keeping up with the community
• #43: Allowing people to move makes it easier to bridge gaps as you have a chance of creating common communication structures
• #45: Update slide for surveymapper?
• #46: Update slide for surveymapper?
• #51: Drawing on pool of specialists to drive the continued improvement and impact of research software developed by and for researchers
• #52: Become our next collaborator – email [email protected]
• #53: Molecules will adopt different structures, these structures may dissolve in different ways: polymorphism Dosage profile for drugs
• #54: Millennium Seed Bank – Royal Botanic Gardens Kew
• #56: There is a spectrum of approaches Examples: -