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Define Legacy RSE role and redistribute maintenance role skills and tasks into Project/community manager RSE role #222

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merged 7 commits into from
Feb 16, 2024
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Define Legacy RSE role and redistribute maintenance role skills and tasks into Project/community manager RSE role #222

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c1663cf
Split Maintenance RSE role into Maintenance RSEs and Legacy RSEs
sdruskat Dec 15, 2023
354a299
Add governance skill
sdruskat Dec 15, 2023
d22d50f
Make scalable a word
sdruskat Dec 18, 2023
0402a0f
Merge branch 'CaptainSifff:main' into split-maintenance-role
sdruskat Feb 14, 2024
4964a74
Sharpen the context of Legacy RSE role
sdruskat Feb 14, 2024
69ff932
Redistribute Maintenance RSE tasks and skills under PM/CM RSE
sdruskat Feb 14, 2024
4385e02
Update competencies.md
CaptainSifff Feb 16, 2024
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1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions .github/spellignore.txt
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Expand Up @@ -142,6 +142,7 @@ RSE
RSE's
rse-specialisations
RTPs
scalable
scipy
SeniorCC
SRU
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18 changes: 11 additions & 7 deletions competencies.md
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Expand Up @@ -1029,7 +1029,11 @@ Like the Data-focused RSE, they have a deep understanding of \ac{RDM} topics.
#### Project/community manager RSEs

When research software projects become larger, they need someone who manages
processes and people. This gap can be filled by people who invest in the (\gls{PM}), (\gls{USERS}), and (\gls{TEAM}) skills, as exemplified in @subsec:examplecareer.
processes and people.
In practice, this concerns change management for code and documentation
and community work to safeguard usability and adaptability,
but also handling project governance and scalable decision-making processes.
This gap can be filled by people who invest in the (\gls{PM}), (\gls{USERS}), and (\gls{TEAM}) skills, as exemplified in @subsec:examplecareer.
Building a community around a research project is an
important building block in building sustainable software [@Segal2009], so these RSEs play
an important role, even if they do not necessarily touch much of the code themselves.
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -1081,12 +1085,12 @@ on the other hand knowledge about setup and configuration of particular server s
e.g., setup of virtual machines on hypervisors or the planning and setup of compute server clusters for \ac{ML}.
As an interface between the researchers and the infrastructure, they take care of user management, access permissions, and configuration of required services.

#### Maintenance RSEs
The constantly evolving software environment can hinder or prevent reproducibility.
In this changing environment, a significant amount of effort in (research) software development
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

Research software may be used and evolved over generations of research without change management or governance processes, while software ecosystems (e.g., programming languages, frameworks, operating systems) constantly evolve.
This may lead to the emergence of legacy code that is actively used.
To safeguard continued usability and adoption,
these RSEs have experience in working with legacy code,
and are competent in the application of software stacks that are no longer part of the general curricula (e.g., \gls{COBOL} or \gls{Fortran}).

#### HPC-RSE

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