Software is both a cause of unreliable research and part of the solution. The bulk of scientific research relies upon specialized software for data management and analysis. The bad news is that much of this software is poorly tested and documented, and researchers often use software in unreliable ways. Part of the problem is that researchers are being asked to perform a job they have not been...
Computational reproducibility is a building block for transparent and cumulative science. It enables the
originator and other researchers, on other computers and later in time, to reproduce and thus understand
how results came about while avoiding various errors that may lead to erroneous reporting of statistical
and computational results. But what does it take to make something...
Software for research has to keep up with the methodological developments in its
field. All too often, only a handful of maintainers bear the load of maintaining and
extending software. In consequence, they are swamped with demands for adding addi-
tional features, resulting in long delays until new innovations become available.
However, in many disciplines, methodological researchers are...
The usual mode of accessing High Performance Computing (HPC) resources involves
interactively connecting to the command-line interface and submitting job
scripts to a job scheduler.
Some services which provide a user interface by themselves (e.g. when working
with graphical data) or services which require HPC resources as a compute
backend for an already existing workflow engine,...
A lot of good software is abandoned once the PhD
student graduates or the programmer leaves the institute. Also
maintaining software doesn’t generate papers which is the unit used to
measure scientific prowess. I believe there are a few low-hanging fruits
that scientific programmers can use to improve the state of research
software development.
