Getting To Know Potential Users of Drasil

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The design and implementation of Drasil are not complete, but we suspect that there is almost enough functionality to use it on real projects. We just need a little more information on how scientists/engineers typically develop code. We have a research project with Olu that is looking at open source projects through their repositories. What is currently missing is an investigation of smaller software projects - the ones that are created by end user developers to further their own research, but not shared externally. The software might not be shared because the developer feels the scope is too small, or maybe because the developer does not know how to share code, and does not see any value in learning how.

Our goal is to learn the following from non-public research software developers:

1. How do they use computing? What kind of code, scripts or spreadsheets do they create?
2. How much documentation is needed with their code?
3. Who is the audience for their code? Personal use? Internal use? External use?
4. Does their software, or a subset of their software, form a program family?
5. What are their pain points with computing?
6. Is there something we could add to Drasil that would enable us to help them?

As a starting point we would like to meet with some non-public research software developers (like faculty colleagues) and ask them an initial question to see if they might benefit from a tool like Drasil:

"Have you ever had a string of 5+ students (masters, summer undergraduates) work on variations of the same core code? Do you find that, some time later, neither you nor your current students can actually run or even understand these?"

For answers that suggest an overlap with what Drasil can do, here are some potential follow-up questions (based on the overall goals mentioned above):

1. What is the purpose of their code/scripts/complex spreadsheets?
2. who are the stakeholders involved? [students past and future, journals, colleagues, etc]
3. (If there are people in the future involved): how do they learn about the purpose and design?
4. tell us about the changes that have had to be made - or the whole new versions.
5. what aspects of that do you find most painful?