Collaborative Research: Elements: Software: Software Health Monitoring and Improvement Framework

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Software underpins every aspects of modern life, with significant impact in society. Poor quality software can cause huge financial losses, even threatening people's lives. Software quality is even more critical within the scientific community. The reproducibility of research results and sustainability of the research itself, heavily depend on the quality of the software developed by scientists, who usually acquire basics of software programming but are not aware of the best design practices. As a consequence, several existing open access scientific software packages are known to be hard to use and evolve due to their poor quality, as highlighted in recent studies. This project will integrate and enhance recent advances in software issue detection and refactoring techniques, created by the PIs and sponsored by NSF, in order to serve diverse scientific and engineering domains, detecting and fixing software quality issues effectively. This proposal seeks to bridge the gap between software engineering community and other science and engineering community in general. It will provide quantitative comparisons of software projects against an industrial benchmark, enable users to pinpoint software issues responsible for high maintenance costs, visualize the severity of the detected issues, and refactor them using the proposed interactive refactoring framework. The proposed framework will bring together software users and software developers by enabling non software experts to post software challenges for the software community to solve, which will, in turn, boost the research and advances in software research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.