The Four Pillars of Research Software Engineering - Cohen *et al.*

This resource first appeared in issue #11 on 21 Feb 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Software Development

The Four Pillars of Research Software Engineering - Cohen et al.

In this article, we have presented 4 pillars representing a set of areas and activities that we consider to be vital in offering coordinated and comprehensive support for research software and the people who build it. In turn, we hope this will demonstrate to professional developers and researchers alike that research is a viable, and interesting, environment for a software development career.

In this white paper, the authors present what they see as the key pillars around which support for research software development (which I will interpret more broadly to include research computing writ large):

• Research Software Development/Research Computing work itself; increasing professionalism around research computing best practices around reproducibility, maintainability, etc.
• Building a community of research computing staff to exchange and develop expertise and shape those best practices
• Training - ongoing professional development for research computing staff, and
• Policy - institutional and governmental recognition of and support for research computing funding and staff

I think this is a good resource for informing discussions with institutional and funding-agency decision makers about what modern research computing requires. The authors also point to a number of emerging national and sub-national efforts around the world to address these pillars, including groups in France, Germany, and the Nordics that I hadn’t known about.