Human factors in industrial research software engineering

Abstract

At the German Aerospace Center (DLR), research software is developed at over 50 institutes at 30 locations and ranges from small data analysis scripts developed by individual researchers to mission-critical software and production-ready software developed in cooperation with industry partners. Tools and training to support collaborative and sustainable software engineering of software at different maturity levels are offered by DLR's Software Engineering Initiative. In addition to assuring a high-quality standard, the Software Engineering Initiative provides a platform to create, share and discuss content related to software engineering. To better understand the diverse contexts in which software engineering support is needed and to evaluate the community-building activities, qualitative and quantitative studies are conducted. To facilitate participation in such studies and the recruitment of relevant target groups, we are currently building a human subject pool. Our future goal is to expand this human subject pool beyond DLR, including research software engineers from other research organizations in Germany and abroad, to provide a tool for longitudinal and cross-sectional studies across different scientific domains and contexts. In our talk, we will present the current status and discuss how a large-scale human subject pool can contribute to empirical research on research software engineering.