W. Spencer Smith

W. Spencer Smith, Adam Lazzarato, Jacques Carette

We present a reproducible method to analyze the state of software development practices in a given scientific domain and apply this method to Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The analysis is based on grading a set of 30 GIS products using a template of 56 questions based on 13 software qualities. The products range in scope and purpose from a complete desktop GIS systems, to stand-alone tools, to programming libraries/packages. The final ranking of the products is determined using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multicriteria decision making method that focuses on relative comparisons between products, rather than directly measuring qualities. The results reveal concerns regarding the correctness, maintainability, transparency and reproducibility of some GIS software. Three recommendations are presented as feedback to the GIS community: 1) Ensure each project has a requirements specification document, 2) Provide a wealth of support methods, such as an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel, a Stack Exchange tag for new questions, or opening the issue tracker for support requests, as well as the more traditional email-based methods, and, 3) Design product websites for maximum transparency (of the development process), for open source projects, provide a developer's guide.

W. Spencer Smith, Ao Dong, Jacques Carette et al.

We selected 29 medical imaging projects from 48 candidates, assessed 10 software qualities by answering 108 questions for each software project, and interviewed 8 of the 29 development teams. Based on the quantitative data, we ranked the MI software with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The four top-ranked software products are 3D Slicer, ImageJ, Fiji, and OHIF Viewer. Generally, MI software is in a healthy state as shown by the following: we observed 88% of the documentation artifacts recommended by research software development guidelines, 100% of MI projects use version control tools, and developers appear to use the common quasi-agile research software development process. However, the current state of the practice deviates from the existing guidelines because of the rarity of some recommended artifacts, low usage of continuous integration (17% of the projects), low use of unit testing (about 50% of projects), and room for improvement with documentation (six of nine developers felt their documentation was not clear enough). From interviewing the developers, we identified five pain points and two qualities of potential concern: lack of development time, lack of funding, technology hurdles, ensuring correctness, usability, maintainability, and reproducibility. The interviewees proposed strategies to improve the state of the practice, to address the identified pain points, and to improve software quality. Combining their ideas with ours, we have the following list of recommendations: increase documentation, increase testing by enriching datasets, increase continuous integration usage, move to web applications, employ linters, use peer reviews, design for change, add assurance cases, and incorporate a "Generate All Things" approach.