It Takes a Socio-Technical Ecosystem

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of socio-technical ecosystems in balancing the evolving needs of scientists and the stability requirements of developers for sustainable scientific software.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of socio-technical ecosystems as a framework for addressing technical and social challenges in scientific software development.

Findings

Socio-technical ecosystems facilitate trade-offs between stability and evolution.

They support sustainable development of scientific software.

The ecosystem approach improves collaboration among stakeholders.

Abstract

There are both technical and social issues regarding the design of sustainable scientific software. Scientists want continuously evolving systems that capture the most recent knowledge while developers and architects want sufficiently stable requirements to ensure correctness and efficiency. A socio-technical ecosystem provides the environment in which these issues can be traded off.