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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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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 @@ -137,6 +137,7 @@ RSE
RSE's
rse-specialisations
RTPs
scalable
scipy
SeniorCC
SRU
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13 changes: 11 additions & 2 deletions competencies.md
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Expand Up @@ -1056,8 +1056,17 @@ As an interface between the researchers and the infrastructure, they take care o
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}).
Maintenance RSEs are mainly concerned with change management for code and documentation,
and working with the community to safeguard usability and adaptability.
They have additional competence in the governance of software projects,
and scalable decision-making processes.

#### 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,
which 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 not part of the general curricula any more (e.g., \gls{COBOL} or \gls{Fortran}).

#### HPC-RSE

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10 changes: 10 additions & 0 deletions contributors.yml
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Expand Up @@ -213,6 +213,16 @@ authors:
orcid: 0000-0002-9935-4428
email: [email protected]

- author: "Stephan Druskat"
firstName: Stephan
lastName: Druskat
initials: SD
affiliations:
- German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute for Software Technology, Berlin, Germany
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Department of Computer Science, Berlin, Germany
orcid: 0000-0003-4925-7248
email: [email protected]

# please use the following author template (all fields are optional):

# - author: "F. D. C. Willard, Jr."
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