Promote improved user-developer experiences

Membership: Open (contact the chairs to participate)

Meeting schedule: Webinars on First Tuesday of odd months at 12:00pm Eastern; Informal discussion on First Tuesday of even months at 12:00pm Eastern

Chairs: Hannah Cohoon (LBNL), Drew Paine (LBNL)

Charter

Purpose: The User/Developer Experience (UDX) Working Group (WG) brings together groups and individuals interested in the science of scientific software development and use. UDX encompasses the experiences stakeholders have with libraries and tools used when creating code, as well as the end-user experience for software produced through those efforts. The UDX WG organizes bi-monthly webinars to improve understanding of how users and developers interact with and experience scientific software. Webinars include content like tutorials, research talks, and experience reports; these are opportunities to better understand the status quo of user and developer experiences in research software, as well as opportunities for research software engineers (RSEs) and PIs to learn to assess or address UDX themselves. In addition to webinars, the WG will host bi-monthly discussions open to anyone interested in UDX. To forge connections across the scientific software community, members of other software stewardship and research software organizations (e.g. PESO, US-RSE) are encouraged to attend. Discussions will be guided by community members and are expected to be informal, serving as opportunities to gather feedback or as a forum to share ideas and perspectives. Topics for discussions and webinars include how documentation is presented and maintained; how applications are updated and installed; how code contributions from dispersed developers are managed and integrated; how tasks are arranged into workflows; how web, desktop, and command line interfaces are leveraged; how organizational policies are navigated, and beyond.

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

Relationships to other working groups: We will interact with the Metrics and Impact Framework WGs if we discover information that could inform efforts of these WGs or can ourselves benefit from their progress. We will interact with the Software Ecosystem WG to improve the quality of ecosystem products and community activities.

Expected lifetime: Standing. Subject to annual review of needs and purpose.

Expected membership: Open

Reporting expectations: Annually

Charter approval status: Active as of 2025-12-19

Additional resources