On The Evolution Of User Support Topics in Computational Science and Engineering Software

TL;DR

This study analyzes a decade of user support emails for PETSc to understand how user requests evolve over time, revealing stable support categories despite hardware and software changes, and emphasizing the importance of developer involvement.

Contribution

It provides a longitudinal analysis of user support topics in scientific software, highlighting the persistent nature of support needs and the critical role of core developers.

Findings

Support request categories remained stable over ten years.

Total communication volume increased four-fold.

Developer involvement is essential for effective user support.

Abstract

We investigate ten years of user support emails in the large-scale solver library PETSc in order to identify changes in user requests. For this purpose we assign each email thread to one or several categories describing the type of support request. We find that despite several changes in hardware architecture as well programming models, the relative share of emails for the individual categories does not show a notable change over time. This is particularly remarkable as the total communication volume has increased four-fold in the considered time frame, indicating a considerable growth of the user base. Our data also demonstrates that user support cannot be substituted with what is often referred to as 'better documentation' and that the involvement of core developers in user support is essential.