Towards Evidence-Based Software Quality Practices for Reproducibility: Practices and Aligned Software Qualities

Résumé fourni par la source

Among computational science and engineering (CSE) software development projects, reproducibility of results is widely understood to be essential for the software to be useful and meaningful. At present, there is a lack of empirical support for how best to design for, implement, or maintain reproducibility over the course of the CSE software lifecycle, and the relationship between reproducibility and other qualities of interest is not well-understood. In this study, we consider the role of software engineering practices and product qualities in enabling reproducibility. To build a foundation for future studies, we conducted case studies of the software engineering practices of 9 teams at Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia), and a first-in-kind online survey of 219 developers and users of CSE software to assess their beliefs about quality and reproducibility. Among our results, we identified three practices that were universally attributed to enhancing reproducibility of research and software at Sandia: automated testing, documentation, and version control. We found that the majority of survey respondents believed that high-quality software was more likely to be reproducible than low-quality software, and that maintainability, reliability, and usability were generally seen as positively contributing to reproducibility. These preliminary findings merit follow-up studies to better understand how software quality is valued and enacted in CSE software development practice.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.