Dan Katz' Community and Travel Funds Report: deRSE25

community-awards usrse conference travel-fund talk poster

Published: Mar 28, 2025 by Daniel S. Katz

I’m thankful to have been partially supported by US-RSE’s Community and Travel Funds program, using a grant from the Alfred P Sloan foundation, to attend the 2025 German RSE Conference (deRSE25), which was co-located with the 2025 German Software Engineering Conference (SE25). While at the conference in Karlsruhe, Germany, I presented one talk and one poster.

The talk was: Katz, D. S., Clifford, B., Hunter Kesling, K., Chard, K., & Babuji, Y. (2025, February 25). Research Software Phases, Sustainability, and RSEs. 5th conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany (deRSE25), Karlsruhe, Germany. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14922563

Research software projects often are initially funded by a grant that supports development of the software. But when the grant ends, the projects have to shift to another model to support the required software maintenance, if the software is going to continue being used. This talk will look at the Parsl project and its effort to become sustainable, across a set of project phases. It will also look at the different kinds of RSE work that have taken place during the project. These activities, phases, and developer types appear to be useful concepts for planning or studying other research software projects, or research software as a whole. The talk will be partly aimed at finding others who want to collaborate on understanding how general these results are, and how much they can benefit other projects.

After the talk, a few people came up to me to say that they had similar experiences, and we started discussing a collaborative paper to look at three such projects.

The poster, which was also presented at US-RSE’24 in Albuquerque, was: Yehudi, Y., Cashman, M., Felderer, M., Goedicke, M., Hasselbring, W., Katz, D. S., Löffler, F., Müller, S., & Rumpe, B. (2025). Towards Defining Lifecycles and Categories of Research Software. deRSE25 Conference, Karlsruhe. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15002661

Research software comes in many forms at various stages of development. Traditional software engineering models often fall short in meeting the unique needs of Research Software Engineering (RSE) projects, confusing users, developers, funders, and stakeholders. A collaborative effort between software engineering researchers (SERs) and RSEs at a Dagstuhl seminar aimed to address this issue. The group found discrepancies in terminology and definitions, such as varying views on the stage of a software project. Through their work, they explored concepts like software maturity, intended audience, and future use. This poster presents a working categorization of research software types and an abstract software lifecycle model that can be customized for different projects. The goal is to guide decisions and development standards tailored to each stage and team. Community input is sought to improve these tools in future iterations.

There was a lot of good discussion about the poster, and I captured the contributions of others as sticky notes, as seen below. The group of authors is now considering writing a paper based on this to a call open to deRSE25 attendees to expand their presentations into papers. Poster with sticky notes

In addition to presenting, I also enjoyed attending. I was also at deRSE last year, so I’ve gotten to know a number of people in the German RSE community, and it was nice to meet them again and to be able to find out about their recent work.

A few other random thoughts:

I was surprised by the number of talks that had slides decorated with generative AI images. In some cases, the images were helpful in illustrating the ideas, but in many, they were just visual noise that, for me, took away from the actual content of the talk.
I felt like there were a lot of quite different views of what RSEs are, how they work, how they fit into an organization, and how they work with one or more projects. I guess this isn’t much different than the US, though I did feel like there might have been some systematic difference between the experience of RSEs in the two countries, but not in a way I can easily describe.
Having the RSE and SE meetings co-located, with some common events and common breaks, was useful, and I am envious that this happens in Germany. I wonder if we could get a subset of the US SE community to work more closely with US-RSE, or at least to talk more together?

Again, I really appreciate the support from US-RSE that enabled me to attend this meeting!