Welcome to the CAES³AR project website

Collaborative and efficient scientific software support architecture

Project information

CAES³AR (Collaborative and Efficient Scientific Software Support Architecture) is an open, discipline-independent initiative designed to improve the way research software is supported and maintained. The project aims to develop an infrastructure that automates and streamlines software support workflows. It aims to address challenges such as reproducing user issues, collaborative support in solving these and dealing with dependency-related problems, while fostering transparent collaboration between developers and users. By reducing the manual burden of technical support, CAES³AR ultimately aims to allow software-supporting research teams to focus more on scientific innovation and less on troubleshooting.

Scientific objective

The main objective of this project is to develop, establish and organize a collaborative support architecture first tested for pyGIMLi, which makes the process of software support more elegant, robust, and efficient. The resulting service, however, will allow generalization to other research software projects. Specifically, CAES³AR will allow that:

1. A user creates a GitHub/GitLab issue or discussion, which contains a link to a (temporary) code execution environment (e.g. JupyterLab) with collaborative editing features enabled (potentially linked to existing JupyterHub infrastructures, e.g. in NRW or as part of the NFDI).
2. So-called Bots (e.g., powered by GitHub actions or GitLab jobs) give automated feedback that the problem indeed exists on all platforms and with the most recent versions of the software. Or alternatively, they can inform that the problem does not occur with the latest version of the software, recommend updating and automatically close the issue.
3. If the problem persists, supporters can help with the problem at hand by directly adapting the user code in Jupyter without downloading or installing anything.
4. Proposed changes to make the user code work will appear as formatted code changes (“diffs”) with author attribution in the Git issue for future reference (when the temporary JupyterHub instance is not available anymore).

Mailing List

Stay connected to CAES³AR by signing up for our mailing list to receive updates on the project’s progress and information about upcoming workshops.

Funding

This project is funded by the DFG Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) with project number 561181781 under the “Research Software Infrastructures” funding programme which belongs to “Scientific Library Services and Information Systems (LIS)”. For more information, follow the DFG project details.