Relevant Human Factors for Research Software Engineering

Kurzfassung

In this talk we show the interplay of the support activities for research software development at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and focus on human aspects around the community building efforts. We present the current status and lay out our plans for further advances. Software is mainly developed by researchers who are domain experts and usually have limited background in professional software development. To enable them developing software at different maturity levels, DLR provides practical software development guidelines. These guidelines are underpinned by infrastructure for software development, the offering of training courses and internal consulting services. However, specific challenges are to make researchers aware of these offerings and to help them finding the right information at the right time. These aspects cannot be simply addressed by rigor quality assurance processes alone. Thus, DLR invests in community building activities to connect researchers, make them aware of available support and to actively engage them. The German Aerospace Center is a large research organization in Germany with focus on applied sciences. Software developed at DLR ranges from small data analysis scripts up to mission critical software and production-ready software created in cooperation with industry partners.