FEniCSX: A sustainable future for the FEniCS Project
The FEniCS Project was founded in 2003, and is open source software for the automatic solution of partial differential equations using the finite element method. Only a few individuals involved in the early days are still active in 2019, and the scientific software landscape has changed immeasurably in that time. Nonetheless, the FEniCS Project is still actively maintained, widely used, and is currently undergoing a complete overhaul in a project we call FEniCSX. In this talk I will highlight four of the most impactful changes with respect to the sustainability of the FEniCS Project:
Formalisation of a governance structure within NumFOCUS. By joining NumFOCUS, the FEniCS Project has gained access to a huge variety of legal, administrative and fundraising opportunities.
Sustainable pathways for bringing in new contributors. Examples include access to the Google Summer of Code programme, which has lead to some of the most significant new features (e.g. complex number support).
The FEniCSX technical redevelopment. FEniCSX is a complete redevelopment of the FEniCS Project's software components, with a strong focus on simplicity, extensibility and standards compliance.
Reducing time burden on core developers with software as a service. We used to administer many services e.g. continuous integration, ourselves. Wherever possible, we are now using external third party services.
Presented at SIAM PP20 Minisymposium: Improving Productivity and Sustainability for Parallel Computing Software.
