Software is at the heart of modern academic science, but our institutions for education and research are undergoing growing pains concerning the proper care and feeding of software and software developers in the context of academia.
Conducting open, reproducible, computational science in the domains involves many practical challenges. Leading a software-development-focused research group in academia can be difficult to fund and manage with traditional strategies. Similarly, programs for training students in the domain sciences to become effective computational researchers are rare, immature, untested, or untennable. Research leaders are also faced with challenges in software sustainability and are unprepared to develop the user-developer communities needed to sustain and improve their software in their scientific domain. Finally, efforts to improve the quality of scientific software through top-down pressure are hampered by publication venues (journals, etc.) hesitant to adopt and uphold stricter software quality requirements.
Software Carpentry, Lab Carpentry, The Hacker Within, and other initiatives are currently lowering the barriers for academics who produce software as part of their research work. However, more effort is needed to support a new generation of computationally fluent research teams.