Uncovering Scientific Software Sustainability through Community Engagement and Software Quality Metrics
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
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| _version_ | 1866912701354082304 |
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| author | Ahmed, Sharif Thakur, Addi Malviya Watson, Gregory R. Eisty, Nasir U. |
| author_facet | Ahmed, Sharif Thakur, Addi Malviya Watson, Gregory R. Eisty, Nasir U. |
| contents | Scientific open-source software (Sci-OSS) projects are critical for advancing research, yet sustaining these projects long-term remains a major challenge. This paper explores the sustainability of Sci-OSS hosted on GitHub, focusing on two factors drawn from stewardship organizations: community engagement and software quality. We map sustainability to repository metrics from the literature and mined data from ten prominent Sci-OSS projects. A multimodal analysis of these projects led us to a novel visualization technique, providing a robust way to display both current and evolving software metrics over time, replacing multiple traditional visualizations with one. Additionally, our statistical analysis shows that even similar-domain projects sustain themselves differently. Natural language analysis supports claims from the literature, highlighting that project-specific feedback plays a key role in maintaining software quality. Our visualization and analysis methods offer researchers, funders, and developers key insights into long-term software sustainability. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07851 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Uncovering Scientific Software Sustainability through Community Engagement and Software Quality Metrics Ahmed, Sharif Thakur, Addi Malviya Watson, Gregory R. Eisty, Nasir U. Software Engineering Scientific open-source software (Sci-OSS) projects are critical for advancing research, yet sustaining these projects long-term remains a major challenge. This paper explores the sustainability of Sci-OSS hosted on GitHub, focusing on two factors drawn from stewardship organizations: community engagement and software quality. We map sustainability to repository metrics from the literature and mined data from ten prominent Sci-OSS projects. A multimodal analysis of these projects led us to a novel visualization technique, providing a robust way to display both current and evolving software metrics over time, replacing multiple traditional visualizations with one. Additionally, our statistical analysis shows that even similar-domain projects sustain themselves differently. Natural language analysis supports claims from the literature, highlighting that project-specific feedback plays a key role in maintaining software quality. Our visualization and analysis methods offer researchers, funders, and developers key insights into long-term software sustainability. |
| title | Uncovering Scientific Software Sustainability through Community Engagement and Software Quality Metrics |
| topic | Software Engineering |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07851 |