An Exploration of Sustainability Thinking in Research Software Engineering

Research software is challenged by comparatively short educational cycles and intermediate academic funding cycles versus long-term research progress. Typical BSc, MSc and Phd projects, which contribute significantly to the development of research software, have a typical duration of 3 months to 4 years and while they ideally build on previous work, these works often turn into components that, after graduation, are shelved to die. This paper shows an avenue for research which can be characterized as rethinking the development of research software from a sustainability perspective. In order to get clarity on the underlying values and to extract exemplary sustainability requirements, we instantiate a sustainability reference model for the case example of two dedicated research software systems from the field of Model-Driven Engineering. This provides discussion grounds for a wider exploration of sustainable research software.

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