Investigating Developers' Perception on Success Factors for Research Software Development
Abstract: Modern research depends on software libraries, tools, and applications, specially in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support science, engineering, and business. Research software is often developed in academia by academic researchers in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). However, this software rarely achieves effective success: it is often developed and maintained in an inefficient and unsustainable way, resulting in failure, non-adoption, and abandonment. The goal of this work is to better understand how academic research software developers evaluate success factors in different categories: technical, organizational, and people. A survey with thirty Brazilian academic research software developers was conducted to gather information about the level of importance of the factors. An analysis of the collected data was conducted to identify the importance of these success factors. The results show the ranking of success factors into categories among the research developers. Our study indicates that academic developers can conduct more software development by being aware of the success factors that can provide software sustainability and successfully. The comprehension of the level of importance of each factor will help to improve and guide the support for research software developers on development.
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