I'm wondering what the current #standards are for ensuring #sustainability in software development. If the team which develops an #open-source program then stops developing it, does the program simply slowly die? Or are there steps (in computer science) that can be taken to avoid/mitigate this?
Would be grateful for re-posts!
@litteracarolina even very successful software projects die out after their creators stop maintaining them. Your goal would be to build a lively community around the tools, so it can bring back up an abandoned project. Funding is crucial in such transitory moments, but there's no recipe for how long. Then anything else like good documentation, test coverage, etc. are very helpful, but secondary.
@mapto This is really helpful, thank you very much. It's roughly as I suspected, and it's really difficult in my field, where software is developed in short projects and the user base is humanities scholars without any idea of code. It's maybe an issue the field as a whole needs to address.
@litteracarolina Well, no doubt attempts are being made. This upcoming event (https://2023.computational-humanities-research.org/) held two weeks is indicative of the trend in the wider Digital Humanities field. If you mean the narrower field of Paleography, I have become part of an interesting experiment.
More than 10 years ago, a Paleoslavist colleague of mine collaborated with a more computer-science-savvy peer to develop a tool to help extracting word indices of parallel bilingual texts with multiple manuscript copies. That tool died out at the end of the project. Now my colleague approached me with new funding for a similar (more-complex) task. Together with the two of them we decided to take a more open approach, using Python instead of Java, making it open source and putting an effort to make it more accessible. We are at the end of the funding.
My impression is that the tool is flexible enough to be used for other projects, but the demand for this type of work is very limited. This is mostly so because it is part of very tedious hand work and a historic field that doesn't have money flowing in. This is even more so after the invasion of Ukraine which finally wrecked the already dissonant academic community.
If interested, here is the project site: https://uchitelnoevangelie.eu/?lang=en
and here the software code: https://github.com/mapto/UchitelnoEvangelie
@litteracarolina or maybe the same thing put differently: you need a strong user base so it could have the motivation to find the way forward