Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)

HICSS-57 Website

Software Sustainability: Research on Usability, Maintainability and Reproducibility

HICCS Mini-Track
Research Track: Software Technology

The focus on software usability, long-lasting and reproducible software is a timely one that spans various domains of science and significant investment of research funding both in the US, Europe, U.K, and elsewhere. Software has become a major driver for research with over 90% of researchers answering surveys that they use software for their research and over 65% expressing that they even could not do their research without software. The computational landscape has evolved from system-centered design focusing on training users to user-centered design delivering solutions that are intuitive and/or self explanatory. The prominence of research software creates challenges in the following areas – usability and ease of use, sustainability, and reproducibility. Thus, the concept of long-lasting, easy to use software accelerating science is a major concern for researchers. Additionally, researchers would like to be able to re-use software technologies to be able to analyze further data with established and verified methods, which is part of reproducibility approaches.

The three concepts usability, sustainability and reproducibility are interconnected with each other and cover a wide range of application areas. They affect all layers of the software process – from enabling reproducing experiments via an easy user interface to using containerization for application portability. Such concepts are also relevant in the building of Science Gateways (also known as virtual laboratories or virtual research environments), which by definition serve communities with end-to-end solutions tailored specifically to their needs. The mini-track will focus on the broad spectrum of submissions that deal with complex scenarios such as containerization, strategies for long-lasting software, usability and user interface issues, handling data curation and provenance and more. The minitrack will focus on the broad spectrum of submissions that deal with complex scenarios such as containerization, strategies for long-lasting software, usability and user interface issues, handling data curation and provenance and more. Consequently, we anticipate submissions not limited to but in the scope of the following topics:

• Web-based solutions (web sites, science gateways, virtual labs, etc.)
• Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
• Computational and Data-Intensive Workflows
• Novel approaches in containerization
• Sustainability practices in software development
• System architectures for testing and continuous integration
• Emerging best practices in Machine Learning software
• Best practices and Key Success Factors for usability, sustainability and reproducibility
• Community building practices

For more information, please visit the conference website.