Organizing Oceanographic Infrastructure: The Work of Making a Software Pipeline Repurposable

Abstract

Drawing from a longitudinal case study, we inspect the activities of an expanding team of scientists and their collaborators as they sought to develop a novel software pipeline that worked both for themselves and for their wider community. We argue that these two tasks - making the software work for themselves and also for their wider scientific community - could not be differentiated from each other at the beginning of the software development process. Rather, this division of labor and software capacities emerged, articulated by the actors themselves as they went about their tasks. The activities of making the novel software "work" at all, and the "extra work" of making that software repurposable or reusable could not be distinguished until near the end of the development process - rather than defined or structured in advance. We discuss implications for the trajectory of software development, and the practical work of making software repurposable.