Now, let's have a look who stands behind the groundbreaking software solutions made by Helmholtz:
The median software developer in our survey has 8 years of research experience, 9 years of software development experience,
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@@ -48,27 +46,27 @@ Software is typically developed in a team with 2-5 other developers for a user b
These results support what has been suspected earlier, namely, that software development is fundamental to researchers' work.
The following figure illustrates how closely research and software development are related:


The more time survey participants spent on research related work, the more experienced they were in terms of software development.
The question which role software development plays in research could then be answered: an important one!
Given the strong link between software development and research, we wanted to know whether researchers felt sufficiently supported at their centers.
Given the strong link between software development and research, we wanted to know whether researchers felt sufficiently supported at their research centers.


The answer was a classical Jein. While half (50.8%) of the respondents seemed satisfied with the status quo,
The answer was a classical Jein. While half (50.8%) of the respondents seemed satisfied with the current state,
the other half of the respondents (49.2%) reported that they needed more support.
Clearly, we wanted to know which kind of support they needed. So we asked them.
To find out which support activities they were most interested in and which services we should focus on in the future,
we let them choose from a list of predefined services.


In order to get a more detailed picture of what could be improved, we also included a few open response questions asking
respondents about their wishes and suggestions for a good software development support and their
preferred kind of learning. Word frequency analysis + code frequency analysis


This suggests that in addition to training and consulting offerings a central, easily accessible infrastructure is urgently needed.
Another aspect is the recognition and regulation of open science practices and open source development.
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@@ -79,10 +77,12 @@ in particular from a community perspective, important to have a closer look at t
Our survey included questions about sharing and publishing own software as well as referencing software in publications.
Results show that most respondents share their code regularly with the own research group, sometimes with the research organization and research community but never with the general public.
They publish their code regularly on internal platforms or public code sharing platforms like GitHub but never on a research repository or a software package index.
Code comments, README files and installation instrucions are regularly provided by most respondents, user manuals, requirement specification and technical doucmentation sometimes,
Code comments, README files and installation instrucions are regularly provided by most respondents, user manuals, requirement specification and technical documentation sometimes,
while release notes, contributor guides and developer guides are almost never provided.
While this suggests that there is at least , it is surprising that most respondents do not license their code

Visibility of research software and reproducibility of results ok but increase in reusability
In conclusion we can say that in addition to providing training and infrastructure, HIFIS software services