Long-term Productivity for Long-term Impact

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new long-term perspective on research software productivity, emphasizing knowledge and user satisfaction over short-term metrics to better capture long-term impact.

Contribution

It introduces a conceptual framework that redefines productivity by valuing long-term knowledge and user satisfaction, addressing limitations of existing short-term biased definitions.

Findings

Highlights importance of long-term impact in research software

Emphasizes value of documentation and human-reusable knowledge

Proposes a new conceptual definition of productivity

Abstract

We present a new conceptual definition of 'productivity' for sustainably developing research software. Existing definitions are flawed as they are short-term biased, thus devaluing long-term impact, which we consider to be the principal goal. Taking a long-term view of productivity helps fix that problem. We view the outputs of the development process as knowledge and user satisfaction. User satisfaction is used as a proxy for effective quality. The explicit emphasis on all knowledge produced, rather than just the operationalizable knowledge (code) implies that human-reusable knowledge, i.e. documentation, should also be greatly valued when producing research software.