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The Scientific Software Developer in academia

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The Scientific Software Developer in academia

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Quanbin Sun

Posted on 1 May 2012

Estimated read time: 4 min
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The Scientific Software Developer in academia

Posted by s.hettrick on 1 May 2012 - 9:49am

WomanAndLaptopR.jpgBy Quanbin Sun, Research Student at the University of Salford.

On 21-22 March, the Collaboration Workshop 2012 took place at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. The workshop mainly focused on software development in academic projects and attracted sixty researchers and developers. Thirty two topics were raised and discussed during the two day event and more than twenty lightning talks were presented.

Among these discussions and topics, I enjoyed the ones that were related to the collaboration between scientific researchers and software developers and a possible new species for academic research projects - the scientific software developer, who plays a dual role in the research.

Who and what is a Scientific Software Developer?

Alongside the rapid development of computer and computer technology, most recent scientific research will involve software or software development (at the workshop, someone mentioned that 40% of research projects were linked to software). The break out topic “Teaching programming to scientists” and “Successful collaboration with computer scientists” provided some nice suggestions. There are some natural limitations. For example, the time a scientist spends focusing on his/her research ability detracts from the time he/she can spend on programming.

We need someone who can fulfil both roles and carry a software project toward success. Someone who knows the nature of research and who is also familiar with the principles of software development.

The current status of the Scientific Software Developer

It is quite common for researchers to do programming themselves and, as we know, this usually result in poor, non-reusable, non-maintainable software.

The EPSRC only invested £9 million per annum in software during the past five years. Comparing to the overall EPSRC budget of £950 million for the year 2012/2013, software definitely seems to be ignored.

There is a lack of recognition for the scientific software developer. Such person may be treated as an RA or RF, even though he/she does a different job. There are some groups (Scientific Software Development and Management, Computational Science, and Computational Scientists and Engineers) in LinkedIn, but we still lack a formal name for whatever we call this new species.

Dirk Gorissen from the University of Southampton mentioned that there are now some posts for scientific software developers, but we have not heard much about these roles at other universities. Kenji Takeda from Microsoft Research also mentioned that Microsoft Research (Cambridge) has a role of “Research Software Development Engineers”, although it is not an academic position.

The problem for a Scientific Software Developer

The main problem with the role of the scientific software developer is the lack of career track and path. There isn’t a senior position for such a role. Eventually, you have to follow the academic route:

Research Assistant –> Research Fellow –> Lecturer –> Senior Lecturer –> Reader –> Professor

A scientific software developer may lack the publications or project grants that are essential in climbing the ladder in academia. What's more, if you decide to join industry, they may consider that you have no practical experience. So the role of the scientific software developers does not contribute to a strong career portfolio.

There are other problems. When bidding for an academic research project, the labour of the software developer is usually under-estimated, which means that there is not enough funding for development. From the university point of view, having a pure scientific software developer unconnected to any project is financially risky, especially in the current situation of government cuts.

What is the future of Scientific Software Developer?

Now, and in the near future, the Scientific Software Developer will be a minority in academia. But things are getting better, as explained by Dan Emmerson from the EPSRC. He introduced the action plan for “Software as an Infrastructure”. We should  expect more funding and job posts in the coming years.

Acknowledgement

First, I would like to thank all the attendees at the workshop and give credit to those who have contributed in the discussion (without them, I could not write such a post). Secondly, I would like to express my special thanks to DevCSI for sponsoring me. Lastly, thanks to all the organisers for their hard work and communications.

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