Long-term Productivity for Long-term Impact
This work addresses the issue of undervaluing long-term impact in research software development, which is incremental as it builds on existing definitions to shift focus.
The paper tackles the problem of flawed short-term biased definitions of productivity in research software development by proposing a new conceptual definition that emphasizes long-term impact, valuing both knowledge production and user satisfaction as key outputs.
We present a new conceptual definition of 'productivity' for sustainably developing research software. Existing definitions are flawed as they are short-term biased, thus devaluing long-term impact, which we consider to be the principal goal. Taking a long-term view of productivity helps fix that problem. We view the outputs of the development process as knowledge and user satisfaction. User satisfaction is used as a proxy for effective quality. The explicit emphasis on all knowledge produced, rather than just the operationalizable knowledge (code) implies that human-reusable knowledge, i.e. documentation, should also be greatly valued when producing research software.