What Makes Research Software Sustainable? An Interview Study with Research Software Engineers

Software is now a vital scientific instrument, providing the tools for data collection and analysis across disciplines from bioinformatics and computational physics, to the humanities. The software used in research is often home-grown and bespoke: it is constructed for a particular project, and rarely maintained beyond this, leading to rapid decay, and frequent 'reinvention of the wheel'. Understanding how to develop sustainable research software, such that it is suitable for future reuse, is therefore of interest to both researchers and funders, but how to achieve this remains an open question. Here we report the results of an interview study examining how research software engineers – the people actively developing software in an academic research environment – subjectively define software sustainability. Thematic analysis of the data reveals two interacting dimensions: intrinsic sustainability, which relates to internal qualities of software, such as modularity, encapsulation and testability, and extrinsic sustainability, concerning cultural and organisational factors, including how software is resourced, supported and shared. Research software engineers believe an increased focus on quality and discoverability are key factors in increasing the sustainability of academic research software.