One way to characterize scientific software communities is through their institutions. Three distinct categories of institutions that develop, use and support scientific software are corporations, research labs and universities. Each category tends to have distinct business models and sets of priorities. However, the broad scientific software ecosystem is inter-dependent and complementary, where products from one category are widely used in others. Even more interaction is possible if the scientific software community can come to understand commonalities and differences.
Originally, we thought would we alternate between software sustainability and developer productivity, but we have evolved our strategy to pick an emerging theme for each year. This year's workshop theme is software teams.
Very little scientific software is developed by indivdual scientists. Instead, teams with diverse skills collaborate on producing and using software to advance scientific discovery and understanding. Understanding how teams function and how teamwork can be improved represents one of the frontiers in improving the impact of software on science. Software team skills and cultures can vary significantly. A scientific software team will certainly have science domain experts but increasingly has expertise in computer science, mathematics and software engineering. As we increase our focus on software teams, we also see value in including expertise in social and cognitive sciences.
We want to interpret software team broadly. We are interested in topics related to small teams, large teams, and a team of teams. We are interested in teams that produce scientific software for themselves (developer-user teams), teams that produce scientific software for others and teams that use (but might not develop) software in their research.