Sustainability of ANDS Applications Projects


Recently, ANDS has congratulated a number of applications projects for their successfully completion. Yet, to many projects, the end of the ANDS project is just the beginning.  After having delivered their software  related deliverables and announced TissueStack 1.1 in April, the  TissueStack development team has had consequent releases of TissueStack 1.2 in August and TissueStack 1.3 in October. Moreover the team, together with their collaborators, has won an ARC linkage grant (2013-2015) for further research and development of the TissueStack.

A number of other projects have also laid out possible future developments. For example, the launch of the  POS (Public Open Space) portal  at a Parks and Leisure Australia workshop has attracted a lot of interests, the team has been considering possible future development of bringing in new datasets into the portals and enhancing the existing functionality of the portal to satisfy information need of stakeholders and end users.

The applications projects  have been driven by research communities and end users. The projects have adopted a similar agile software development process: researchers identify gaps between their research need for data and the use of existing available data,  development team work closely with researchers to elicit their needs and to have researchers evaluate each implementation in regular sprints. In many projects, researchers actively gather requirements from their research community,  sometimes, they have to give way of their own needs to a genuine need in a research community. This genuine involvement of research communities ensure software sustainability and a long term funding future.