BIDS Software Tools and Environments Working Group

As science becomes more data-driven, software plays an increasingly important role. However, a gap in the pipeline has emerged: faculty, students, and postdocs in many scientific domains are not equipped to develop and deliver the advanced software they require. Furthermore, even in computer science, conventional academic roles have little incentive to harden, sustain, share, and integrate their techniques into a robust, reusable software infrastructure.

The charge of this working group is to fill this gap. Our goal is to sidestep inefficiencies to software development arising from competitive funding, including overemphasis on novelty, “not-invented-here” syndrome, underemphasis on usability, and a tendency towards overgeneralization or overspecialization.

Together with our counterparts at the University of Washington and New York University, we are conducting a distributed experiment varying people, policies, procedures, and projects to find foundational methods for the development, delivery, and sustainability of science software.