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

软件支撑着现代生活的方方面面，对社会产生了重大影响。劣质软件会造成巨大的经济损失，甚至威胁到人们的生命安全。在科学界，软件质量甚至更加关键。研究结果的可重复性和研究本身的可持续性在很大程度上取决于科学家开发的软件的质量，他们通常掌握软件编程的基础知识，但不了解最佳设计做法。因此，正如最近的研究所强调的那样，众所周知，几个现有的开放获取科学软件包由于质量差而难以使用和发展。该项目将整合和加强软件问题检测和重构技术的最新进展，这些技术由私人投资机构创建，由国家科学基金会赞助，以服务于不同的科学和工程领域，有效地检测和修复软件质量问题。这项建议旨在弥合软件工程界和其他科学和工程界之间的差距。它将提供软件项目与行业基准的定量比较，使用户能够查明导致高昂维护成本的软件问题，可视化检测到的问题的严重性，并使用拟议的交互式重构框架对其进行重构。拟议的框架将把软件用户和软件开发人员聚集在一起，使非软件专家能够发布软件挑战，供软件社区解决，这反过来将促进软件研究的研究和进步。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.