Discovering and Bridging Knowledge Gaps between Research Software Engineering and Software Engineering Research

Abstract

As RSEs, we apply software engineering methods, practices, and tools to research software. And despite the fact that - statistically - many of us haven’t had formal education in software engineering, we are the software experts in (academic) research in practice.

It's therefore astonishing that as a community, we haven’t traditionally had strong links, active communication, and frequent reciprocal collaborations with the other academic community that is concerned with software engineering methods, practices, and tools: software engineering researchers. Similarly, most software engineering researchers haven't studied research software and its community of developers, although both often are located in the SE researchers' own institutions. There is clearly a gap between our two communities, although it seems clear that we should be able to benefit from each other considerably: RSEs by having access to state-of-the-art software engineering knowledge, methods and tools, and software engineering researchers by gaining a whole new community of practice and their artifacts to investigate.

In this short presentation, we shine a light into the gap between the communities and on recent activities aiming to bring them closer together to unlock mutual benefits. We report on a Dagstuhl Seminar (https://www.dagstuhl.de/24161) where international representatives of the two communities met to understand each other better, find a common language, discover and identify knowledge gaps, and collaborate to build bridges that can potentially cross these gaps in both directions. We also present a common working group where a national RSE association and a national society for computer science come together to enable future collaboration.