Minisymposium

Software sustainability is critical for Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) software. It is also challenging for several reasons, including that CSE software projects often begin as a research activity. Highly complex code makes software more difficult to maintain and less sustainable. Code reviews are a valuable part of the software development lifecycle and can be executed to manage complexity and promote sustainability. However, inadequate code reviews decrease software quality and increase maintenance burden. We developed a technique to guide the code review process that considers cyclomatic complexity levels and changes during code reviews. We then conducted a survey to determine the usefulness of complexity metrics during code reviews and gather feedback. The results indicate that practitioners find the metrics useful and that, over time, utilizing the metrics during pull request code reviews has the potential to improve the maintainability and sustainability of CSE software.

Climate change is a major problem in the world. Changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution resulted in an overall increase in global average temperatures, and air quality due to increased greenhouse gas emissions. These changes have directly and indirectly been linked to health. To clearly see the impact that climate change is having on health, we need to combine health and environment data. Health data exists in a variety of formats, including ambulatory data, prescription data, hospital admissions, and environmental data equally exists in several formats, including near real time satellite data, direct measurements of key climate variables from networks of weather stations, and more. Data journey modelling predicts places of high cost and risk when existing data needs to move to a new development, investigating the movement of data between key stakeholders including storage databases, individuals and more. Integrating health and environment data is crucial for multiple climate impact studies, but data format, access, and use in both fields' present different challenges. This study makes use of the data journey modelling technique to highlight the challenges and overall cost and risk. We display the data journey of integrated health and environment data instances.

Researchers support reproducibility and rigorous science by sharing and reviewing research artifacts—the documentation and code necessary to replicate a computational study. Creating quality research artifacts and conducting reviews for conferences and journals are both considered to be time consuming and poorly rewarded activities. To simplify these scholarly tasks, we studied the work of artifact evaluation (i.e., artifact reviewing) for a recent ACM conference. Through analysis of reviewers’ comments and their responses to a set of three surveys distributed throughout the evaluation process, we recognized common issues reviewers faced and the features of high quality artifacts. To lessen the time and difficulty of artifact creation and evaluation, we identify design implications for infrastructures like the testbeds used to execute research artifacts. By applying the knowledge gleaned through our study, we hope to improve the usability of research infrastructure and, consequently, the reproducibility of research artifacts.

Diversity plays a crucial role in team and organizational success, with positive and challenging implications. Social information processing theory highlights the benefits of diverse perspectives, whereas social identity theory points to potential issues like reduced cohesion and increased conflict. In research software engineering, which includes consulting, education, and community building, the collaboration between experts and scientists emphasizes the complexity of managing diversity. This field encounters various technical knowledge, project scopes, and organizational contexts. Building on last year's discussion, this presentation introduces five consultancy roles—technical domain, tool, scientific domain, organization, and organizational context—to address these challenges. Additionally, we explore community representation and interaction within the German developer community, presenting findings on perceived membership and involvement. This year's talk reviews previous research, details efforts in assembling a diverse participant panel for software engineering studies, and previews future research to uncover the multifaceted effects of diversity in this field. This approach summarizes past and current efforts and anticipates further studies that will delve into the opportunities and challenges diversity presents in research software engineering.