Define Legacy RSE role and redistribute maintenance role skills and tasks into Project/community manager RSE role #222
Conversation
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I think this is a god idea, although I feel extremely old calling Fortran a legacy technology |
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maybe there can be sth. for inspiration, since our original text was longer: |
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I just thought of a nice and in my opinion fitting term for the Legacy-RSE |
that reminds me of being totally confused on a school exchange to France an age ago by the term restaurateur. However, along those lines Conservation RSE might be better than Legacy RSE. |
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:-D The naming is beautiful! But , as you all know, But you all know, that the term legacy software is already out there and everybody knows what it is. Thinking about it, since it is also the case, that nobody wants to work on legacy code, finding a new name for the profession could elevate its status....? |
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Other terms that have come up during the call today:
Generally a good idea to map any new terms to established terms to improve understanding in other communities, e.g., the SE community. |
sdruskat
changed the title
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@mhagdorn @CaptainSifff @MakisH @jcohen02 Ready for review now, after resolving as defined in #222 (comment). |
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I think these changes work really well. |
Co-authored-by: Stephan Druskat <[email protected]>
| needs to be spent on maintenance to ensure that software remains useful or even installable. | ||
| With regard to which additional competency is required, | ||
| these are people having experience with software stacks that are not part of the general curricula any more (e.g., \gls{COBOL} or \gls{Fortran}). | ||
| #### Legacy RSEs |
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This all looks good to me, however one comment - do we want to point out in this section that there is a long history of research software that has been developed since long before the term "RSE" existed. In many cases, where such software has specialist scientific use cases, it may still be in active use and these RSEs represent an important element of maintaining research processes. I really like this example as a way to highlight the way research software is built and maintained (or not) and the challenges that brings with it.
Maybe some text along the lines of the following could be added in this section?:
"The aproaches to funding, building and maintaining specialist software in the research community, especially in domains that have a longer history of building and using software to support their research processes, can lead to software applications that represent a key part of research infrastructure but are still not sustainable. In this context, "Legacy RSEs" can play a vital role in ensuring that key scientific work is not negatively impacted by a lack of skills in software development methods and languages that are less-commonly used today."
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Tagging @sdruskat in case you don't get notified since this is already merged...
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That's a really cool story and, yes, I very much like your addation
I've had the feeling that the Maintenance RSE role as-is tried to combine two separate roles.
Hence, I've tried to split them into what I think are more suitable role descriptions.