On The Evolution Of User Support Topics in Computational Science and Engineering Software
K. Rupp, S. Balay, J. Brown, M. Knepley, L. C. McInnes, B. Smith

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.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsScientific Computing and Data Management · Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques · Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems
