MS5H - Code Complete and More: Emerging Efforts to Improve Software Quality (Part 1/2)
2023-06-28 11:00 - 13:00 (Europe/Stockholm) | Sanada II
Minisymposium

In the book Code Complete by Steve McConnell, the author argues that working software is the only essential deliverable of a software project. At the same time, many other activities requiring diverse skills produce a variety of non-software artifacts that make high-quality software possible and assure the effective use of software in research. As software becomes more important for research, more sophisticated in its design and capabilities, more integrated into research workflows, and more useful to broader communities, additional expertise and tools become important to producing and sustaining software. In this minisymposium, we explore both possible and demonstrated successes resulting from introducing expertise in social and cognitive sciences, organizational psychology, community development and policies, and tools and processes that focus on meta-data in support of high-quality software. We have found that taking into account these aspects of scientific software development, maintenance, and use can significantly improve the value of software, enabling us to improve the quality and frequency of research results and reduce the cost of obtaining them.

Human Factors in Industrial Research Software Engineering

At the German Aerospace Center (DLR), research software is developed at over 50 institutes at 30 locations and ranges from small data analysis scripts developed by individual researchers to mission-critical software and production-ready software developed in cooperation with industry partners. Tools...

Katharina Dworatzyk and Tobias Schlauch (German Aerospace Center)
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The Role of Software Platforms in Supporting Scientific Software Communities

Software platforms provide many services to developers and users. Designed and implemented well, they promote better, faster, and lower-cost development of software products, and provide users with a diverse range of access methods, user support, and ease of use. Furthermore, software platforms prov...

Michael A. Heroux (Sandia National Laboratories, St. John's University)
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How Human-Centered Tools and Processes can Improve Software Development

Modern software engineering in research is increasingly assisted by a plethora of sophisticated development tools. In this presentation, we will take a look at typical tooling and automation processes. Motivated by a human-centric approach for development, we will discuss selected challenges and sol...

Axel Huebl (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
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Finding Time through User Research

User research is commonly thought of as a tool for improving the user's experience—a method for smoothing frictions and increasing engagement. However, user research can also be used to meet developers' goals. In this talk, we present a recent case from our study of a scientific cloud computin...

Hannah Cohoon, Kazi Sinthia Kabir, Tamanna Motahar, and Jason Wiese (University of Utah)

Domain: Applied Social Sciences and Humanities

Session Chair: Michael A. Heroux (Sandia National Laboratories, St. John's University)
