Code Convention Adherence in Research Data Infrastructure Software: An Exploratory Study

Science is rapidly evolving, incorporating technology like autonomous vehicles, high-throughput scientific instruments, high-fidelity numerical models, and sensor networks, all generating data with increasing frequency, variety, and volume. Scientists committed to open science are interested in sharing this data, which requires research data infrastructure (RDI). The software underlying RDI is often created and/or deployed by people who have not received formal training in software engineering, or at organizations with primary mandates that do not include software development. Our understanding of software engineering as a field and practice does not universally translate to this software. As RDI software is pushed to handle larger data sets, and used to share data more widely, it is important to understand the maintainability, the resilience of the development community, and other indicators of long-term software project health. While there is a body of research on scientific software, and on free and open source software, it is not known if existing approaches to assessing these properties are effective for RDI software. In this exploratory study, we calculate one proxy measure for maintainability (code convention adherence) for a popular ocean data management system, and compare the results with four open source projects, and with the apparent experience of users as captured in public mailing lists and an issue tracker. The results advance our limited understanding of this type of software, and inform hypothesis generation and future research design.