Research software is crucial to all computational research across many academic disciplines. Multiple communities are invested in research software, including computer scientists, and first and foremost among them, software engineering researchers, who investigate and develop methods to improve the quality of software and its lifecycle processes. The software engineering for science community does this specifically for research software. Research software engineers (RSEs) in turn select, customize, and apply software engineering methods from computer science within the domain of academic research to create research software.

There is currently an insufficient transfer of state-of-the-art research knowledge from computer science to research software engineering, and vice versa, in part leading to an incomplete understanding in computer science of the domain-specific and general challenges in research software engineering.

This interactive seminar therefore brings the computer science and software engineering research community and the research software engineering community together to define a common language, and apply it to improve reciprocal knowledge transfer, beginning with five key topics:

• Effective specification of the requirements of research software in different application and research disciplines.
• Design, modeling, implementation, operation, reproducibility and maintenance of research software based on the current state of the art in computer science, and specifically (research) software engineering.
• Formal and informal education and training of RSEs in state-of-the-art software engineering research and community building, and vice versa, the provision of better access for the software engineering research community to the problems and challenges that research software engineers face in practice.
• Tackling the challenges of increasingly complex domain problems, data, and software while operating under the resource constraints in current research ecosystems.
• Generalizing the diversity of opinions, experiences, and practices of research software engineering to successfully inform and influence computer science research.

Initialized by select input talks, participants from the different communities will work interdisciplinarily in dynamic breakout groups to discuss the issues at hand, identify potential solutions, and initiate common research programmes. A goal of this Dagstuhl Seminar is that the outcomes be drafted as chapters for a research software engineering field manual.

Creative Commons BY 4.0

Stephan Druskat, Lars Grunske, Caroline Jay, and Daniel S. Katz