Launched in November 2017, the Better Scientific Software (BSSw) site features an ever-expanding collection of resources from a growing community of contributors who are sharing their perspectives on challenges, strategies, and best practices for improving developer productivity and software sustainability. As the new year begins, we thank the entire BSSw community for ongoing work toward better scientific software, and we highlight a few BSSw resources contributed in 2018. We hope that you may discover connections in BSSw resources to your circumstances and priorities. We invite you to peruse the site for lots more content.

Better Planning:

• Planning for Better Software: PSIP-Tools, Mike Heroux
• Adopting Continuous Integration for Long-Timescale Materials, Richard Zamora

Better Development:

• SuperLU: How Advances in Software Practices Are Increasing Sustainability and Collaboration, Xiaoye Li
• Can You Teach an Old Code New Tricks?, Charles Ferenbaugh
• Best Practices for Scientific Computing, Patricia Grubel
• Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for Scientific Software Development, Greg Watson

Better Reliability:

• Better Science through Software Testing, Tom Evans
• Software Verification, Anshu Dubey
• Building Trusted Scientific Software, Mike Heroux

Better Performance:

• Porting Code to New Architectures, Bronson Messer
• Portability Across DOE Office of Science HPC Facilities, Tim Williams

Better Collaboration:

• BSSw Fellowship Activity: Promoting Software Citation, Daniel S. Katz
• Do Social Media and Science Mix? Twitter Use in a Large Research Project, Tim Scheibe
• Scaling Small Teams to a Team of Teams: Shared Consciousness, Elaine Raybourn and David Moulton
• Building Connections and Community within an Institution, Greg Watson and Elsa Gonsiorowski
• Think Locally, Act Globally: Outreach for Better Scientific Software, David Bernholdt
• Research Software Engineer: A New Career Track?, Chris Richardson
• URSSI: Conceptualizing a US Research Software Sustainability Institute, Daniel S. Katz, Jeff Carver, Sandra Gesing, Karthik Ram, and Nic Weber
• Community Organizations: Changing the Culture in Which Research Software is Developed and Sustained, Lois Curfman McInnes

Better Skills:

• Keeping Your Vision Fit for Years of Software Development, Mark Miller
• On Demand Learning for Better Scientific Software: How to Use Resources & Technology to Optimize Your Productivity, Elaine Raybourn

BSSw Succeeds by Your Contributions

Join the BSSw community in raising awareness of the importance of good software practices to scientific productivity! The BSSw site provides a venue to share information and experiences on scientific software issues. If you have experience or expertise that can help other scientific software teams, we encourage you to contribute to the BSSw site. We welcome original articles, blog posts, curated links (brief articles that highlight other web-based content), and event announcements.

Author Info

David Bernholdt, Mike Heroux, and Lois Curfman McInnes serve as the founding editorial team for the Better Scientific Software site. They are passionate about partnering with the computational science community to increase developer productivity and software sustainability.