How Research Software Engineers Can Support Scientific Software
This addresses software quality issues for scientific researchers in high-consequence applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing practices.
The authors tackle the problem of improving software quality in computational science by advocating for a set of tools and best practices that research software engineers can impart to researchers, leading to enhanced quality and research outcomes.
We are research software engineers and team members in the Department of Software Engineering and Research at Sandia National Laboratories, an organization which aims to advance software engineering in the domain of computational science. Our team hopes to promote processes and principles that lead to quality, rigor, correctness, and repeatability in the implementation of algorithms and applications in scientific software for high consequence applications. We use our experience to argue that there is a readily achievable set of software tools and best practices with a large return on investment that can be imparted upon scientific researchers that will remarkably improve the quality of software and, as a result, the quality of research.