Scientific Open-Source Software Is Less Likely To Become Abandoned Than One Might Think! Lessons from Curating a Catalog of Maintained Scientific Software
Scientific software is increasingly essential to support scientific innovation and in many ways it is distinct from other types of software. Unmaintained, buggy, and hard to use software, a perception often associated with scientific software, can hinder scientific progress, yet, in contrast to other types of software, its sustainability is poorly understood. This may partly stem from the absence of an extensive collection of scientific software projects from diverse domains that represent different layers of the software infrastructure as existing curation efforts are fragmented by science domain and/or are small in scale and lack key attributes. We, therefore, aim to curate a large and diverse collection scientific software, including key likely precursors of sustainability and create models of sustainability to understand and inform future research and practice. We first filter 0.5M most active repositories (from over 200M) and use advanced language models to classify software projects into distinct scientific domains and infrastructure layers. After validation, we model how the domain, layer, and other attributes of scientific software affect its sustainability. We further obtain a matched sample of nonscientific software repositories and investigate the differences between scientific and nonscientific software sustainability. We find that infrastructural layers, upstream dependencies, and mentioned publications are associated with a longer lifespan, while projects started further in the past, having bursty activity had shorter lifespan. Against common expectations, science projects have a longer lifetime than matched Open source software (OSS) projects.
Tue 24 JunDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
16:00 - 17:40 | MSR 2Journal First / Ideas, Visions and Reflections / Research Papers / Demonstrations at Cosmos 3C Chair(s): DongGyun Han Royal Holloway, University of London | ||
16:00 10mTalk | Introducing Repository Stability Ideas, Visions and Reflections Giuseppe Destefanis Brunel University of London, Silvia Bartolucci UCL, Daniel Graziotin University of Hohenheim, Rumyana Neykova Brunel University London, Marco Ortu University of Cagliari Pre-print | ||
16:10 20mTalk | Scientific Open-Source Software Is Less Likely To Become Abandoned Than One Might Think! Lessons from Curating a Catalog of Maintained Scientific Software Research Papers Addi Malviya-Thakur The University of Tennessee, Knoxville / Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Reed Milewicz Sandia National Laboratories, Mahmoud Jahanshahi University of Tennessee, Lavinia Francesca Paganini Eindhoven University of Technology, Bogdan Vasilescu Carnegie Mellon University, Audris Mockus University of Tennessee Link to publication DOI | ||
16:30 20mTalk | Who Will Stop Contributing to OSS Projects? Predicting Company Turnover Based on Initial Behavior Research Papers Mian Qin Beijing Institute of Technology, Yuxia Zhang Beijing Institute of Technology, Klaas-Jan Stol Lero; University College Cork; SINTEF Digital , Hui Liu Beijing Institute of Technology DOI | ||
16:50 20mTalk | An empirical study of token-based micro commits Journal First Masanari Kondo Kyushu University, Daniel M. German University of Victoria, Yasutaka Kamei Kyushu University, Naoyasu Ubayashi Waseda University, Osamu Mizuno Kyoto Institute of Technology | ||
17:10 10mTalk | TS-Detector : Detecting Feature Toggle Usage Patterns Demonstrations Md Tajmilur Rahman Gannon University, Mengzhe Fei University of Saskatchewan; Vendasta, Tushar Sharma Dalhousie University, Chanchal K. Roy University of Saskatchewan | ||
17:20 20mTalk | Impact of Request Formats on Effort Estimation: Are LLMs Different than Humans? Research Papers Gül Calikli University of Glasgow, Mohammed Alhamed Applied Behaviour Systems LTD (Hexis), United Kingdom DOI | ||
Cosmos 3C is the third room in the Cosmos 3 wing.
When facing the main Cosmos Hall, access to the Cosmos 3 wing is on the left, close to the stairs. The area is accessed through a large door with the number “3”, which will stay open during the event.