Building a Sustainable Structure for Research Software Engineering Activities
This addresses the need for formal frameworks to support research software developers, but it is incremental as it offers preliminary thoughts rather than a fully developed solution.
The paper tackles the problem of insufficient understanding of effective support structures for research software engineering, proposing an initial high-level model based on key activities and processes to enhance sustainability.
The profile of research software engineering has been greatly enhanced by developments at institutions around the world to form groups and communities that can support effective, sustainable development of research software. We observe, however, that there is still a long way to go to build a clear understanding about what approaches provide the best support for research software developers in different contexts, and how such understanding can be used to suggest more formal structures, models or frameworks that can help to further support the growth of research software engineering. This paper sets out some preliminary thoughts and proposes an initial high-level model based on discussions between the authors around the concept of a set of pillars representing key activities and processes that form the core structure of a successful research software engineering offering.