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What types of review are required before approval of scientific software for publication as a software release? [059]

By Office of Science Quality and Integrity

Approval of scientific software requires two reviews—a code review and a domain review as described in this FAQ. A single reviewer can perform either review or both reviews. The reviewer(s) are selected by the software author with concurrence of a Science Center Director for their qualifications to perform such reviews. [Read more]

Approval of scientific software requires two reviews—a code review and a domain review as described below. A single reviewer can perform either review or both reviews. The reviewer(s) are selected by the software author with concurrence of a Science Center Director for their qualifications to perform such reviews. Additional information is available in the “Review” section of the USGS Software Management website.

  • Code Review: The review ensures overall software code quality. Typical quality checks include, but are not limited to, coding standards, unit tests passing, user input cleansing, memory leaks, vulnerabilities, and optimizations. Additionally, the code review ensures that personally identifiable information (PII), absolute file system paths, internal server host names or IP addresses, usernames/passwords, and other personal, private, or otherwise sensitive information is not included with the software.
  • Domain Review: The review ensures the software generates output that aligns with published or otherwise well-known expected results. This may involve comparing output with external data sets, comparing algorithms with published scholarly articles about the algorithm, and reviewing unit and integration test results.