📋 Tender Overview
Computational tools are indispensable in almost all scientific disciplines. Especially in cases where large amounts of research data are generated and need to be quickly processed reliable carefully developed software is crucial for analyzing and correctly interpreting such data e.g. in biology physics or very recently in epidemiology. However the development and maintenance of scientific software are often characterized by uncertain funding and time pressure which can lead to quality deficiencies. To evaluate software quality in an automated way computer scientists at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT and Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies HITS have designed the SoftWipe tool. They published their findings in the Nature Scientific Reports journal.Adherence to coding standards is rarely considered in scientific software although it can even lead to incorrect scientific results says Professor Alexandros Stamatakis who works both at HITS and at the Institute of Theoretical Informatics ITI of KIT. The open-source SoftWipe software tool provides a fast reliable and cost-effective approach to addressing this problem by automatically assessing adherence to software development standards. Besides designing the above-mentioned tool the computer scientists benchmarked 48 scientific software tools from different research areas to assess to which degree they met coding standards.SoftWipe can also be used in the review process of scientific software and support the software selection process adds Adrian Zapletal. The Masters student and his fellow student Dimitri Hhler have substantially contributed to the development of SoftWipe. To select assessment criteria they relied on existing standards that are used in safety-critical environments such as at NASA or CERN.Our research revealed enormous discrepancies in software quality says co-author Professor Carsten Sinz of ITI. Many programs such as covid-sim which is used in the UK for mathematical modeling of the COVID-19 disease had a very low quality score and thus performed poorly in the ranking. The researchers recommend using programs such as SoftWipe by default in the selection and review process of software for scientific purposes.How Does SoftWipe WorkSoftWipe is a pipeline written in the Python3 programming language that uses several available static and dynamic code analyzers most of them are freely available in order to assess the code quality of software written in CC. In this process SoftWipe compiles the software and then executes it so that programming errors can be detected during execution. Based on the output of the code analysis tools used SoftWipe calculates a quality score between 0 poor and 10 excellent to compute an overall final score.
