“Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Scientific Software: Prioritization, Sentiment, and Propagation Across Artifacts,” received the Best Full Paper Award in the Research Software Engineering track at the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) Conference Series 2026 in Minneapolis!
This work was led by Boise State PhD in Computing student, Eric Melin, with former Boise State Computer Science Assistant Professor Nasir Eisty as part of his U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Program fellowship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Incredibly well-deserved recognition for the effort Eric put into this research.
The paper tackles a question that matters a lot for research computing: how does “self-admitted technical debt” (the shortcuts and known issues developers openly flag in comments, commits, PRs, and issues) actually behave in scientific software compared to traditional open-source projects?
For the research software engineering community, this gives concrete, data-driven guidance on where to focus limited maintenance effort and how to build smarter tools for tracking and prioritizing debt in the long-lived, high-stakes codebases that underpin scientific discovery.
Congratulations to the whole team!