Sustainable development and deployment of an acoustic FEM research software

Scientists develop research codes so as to process and produce scientific results through simulations and experiments. The resulting code base is of high value and potential but often suffers from poor software quality mainly due to the lack of knowledge about software engineering principles. As a result, the sustainability of the developed software is endangered limiting the code’s life to a narrow time span. To confront this problem to a great extent, one can adopt sustainable research code development and deployment approaches like continuous integration, testing, containerization and documentation. In this contribution, the various approaches are introduced in view of application to an acoustic research software based on finite element method (FEM). Finally, the adoption of these sustainable research code approaches has shown significant advantages in terms of ease of software development, usage, reproducibility of scientific results and software’s robustness. The successful application to the acoustic FEM research software and its effectiveness is presented with the help of a publicly accessible code repository.