It Takes a Socio-Technical Ecosystem
This tackles the problem of designing sustainable scientific software for researchers and developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing socio-technical concepts.
The paper addresses the conflict between scientists' need for continuously evolving software and developers' need for stable requirements, proposing a socio-technical ecosystem as a solution to balance these trade-offs.
There are both technical and social issues regarding the design of sustainable scientific software. Scientists want continuously evolving systems that capture the most recent knowledge while developers and architects want sufficiently stable requirements to ensure correctness and efficiency. A socio-technical ecosystem provides the environment in which these issues can be traded off.