Vision and Concept

Software systems in a scientific context:

• Large: Often tens to hundreds of software components

• Heterogeneous: Hosting solutions, version control systems, programming languages, build systems, licenses, maintenance models, 3rd party/1st party, legacy components

• Complex: Dependency structure, versions, variability

Researchers develop software in many different ways:

• Everyone tries to use best suited technologies and process

• Different non-functional requirements (documentation, maintainability, maturity, level of professionalism in development process)

• Teams set up their own CI, sometimes repository hosting – centralized IT services focus on other aspects

Bringing together multiple usually disparate aspects:

• Organizational, social and historical aspects of projects

• Versioning (across version control systems and repository hosting solutions)

• Build system-level dependencies (across build systems and programming languages)

…to facilitate

• Construction and testing

• Deployment

• (Re-)use and reproducibility

• Documentation

• Dissemination

…of large, heterogeneous, complex research software system

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Simplified Meta Model

Build Generator Process

Bootstrapping Process

Docker Builds