Metrics

Membership: Open (contact the chairs to participate)

Meeting schedule: 4:00pm-5:00pm ET Wednesdays, bi-weekly from 2025-01-08

Chairs: Addi Malviya-Thakur (ORNL), Greg Watson (ORNL)

Charter

Purpose: The Metrics Working Group (WG) facilitates a coordinated effort to curate and develop metrics for understanding software sustainability, quality and impact from the perspective of scientific and research software. We will leverage research-backed analysis tools that will enable projects to collect and interpret these metrics for the long-term benefit of their software development efforts. Our goals are to:

• Identify and define metrics that are meaningful for understanding software sustainability, quality and impact.
• Align metrics with the preferences and requirements of foundations, grant-making bodies, and other stakeholders.
• Identify and deploy tools for collecting and analyzing these metrics
• Engage directly with software projects to understand and support their specific needs with respect to relevant metrics.

Read the rest of the charter (the CASS by-laws require additional information in the charter)

Relationships to other working groups: We will work collaboratively with the Impact Framework WG and support their efforts in evaluating and reporting the outcomes of software projects through the use of metrics. Additionally, the Metrics WG will work with other relevant WGs and stakeholders to ensure broad utility and alignment of its outputs.

Expected lifetime: Standing. The WG will periodically refine its metrics and set of tools as the needs of the community evolve.

Expected membership: Open

Reporting expectations: Quarterly

Charter approval status: Provisional, since 2024-10-03

Additional resources

• Slack channel #wg-metrics

News

• We held a mini-workshop on Effective Metrics for Measuring and Enhancing Sustainability in Scientific Software held at the Sustainable Scientific Software Conference (S3C) 2024. This blog article on BSSw.io summarizes the workshop output.