Project in Lieu of Thesis: Curation and Refactoring of Legacy Software

Often it is difficult to build upon and learn from another individual’s code and it is critical to have as much information as possible to build and use the program so that you can utilize or improve the software. Some of the greatest scientific minds have created software that often lays dormant, and has flawed or no metadata to assist in any future endeavors to utilize the software. Software curation involves maintaining, preserving and adding value to legacy research software. For legacy code still in active development, there are countless challenges to be faced in modifying and implementing changes especially for outdated or large scale scientific projects. Digital curation and data preservation are influenced by a desire to share with the wider research community. Necessary actions are required to promote curation and preservation of legacy programs especially in regards to national entities like the Department of Energy. We outline our approach to extending the lifetime of this software in two forms: shelved/dormant software and software that is still in active development

The github project repository for the project containing relevant scripts, reports and presentation materials can be found here.