How Research Software Engineers Can Support Scientific Software

TL;DR

This paper discusses how research software engineers can enhance scientific software quality by promoting best practices, tools, and principles that improve correctness, rigor, and repeatability in computational science applications.

Contribution

It advocates for adopting specific software tools and practices by research software engineers to significantly improve scientific software quality.

Findings

Implementing best practices increases software correctness.

Adopting tools enhances reproducibility of scientific results.

Research software engineers can significantly improve software quality.

Abstract

We are research software engineers and team members in the Department of Software Engineering and Research at Sandia National Laboratories, an organization which aims to advance software engineering in the domain of computational science. Our team hopes to promote processes and principles that lead to quality, rigor, correctness, and repeatability in the implementation of algorithms and applications in scientific software for high consequence applications. We use our experience to argue that there is a readily achievable set of software tools and best practices with a large return on investment that can be imparted upon scientific researchers that will remarkably improve the quality of software and, as a result, the quality of research.