Ownership
WAVEWATCH is a fairly complex modeling system with many contributors. Many of the contributions represent specialized physical and numerical approaches that are generally best understood by their original developers, and may be less transparent for general software engineers (even with good documentation). To keep such a system viable and vibrant, WW4 uses an ownership principle for contributions. In this context ownership refers to contributors to WW4 taking the responsibility for maintenance of the code they contribute. With this meaning of ownership, ownership is consistent with open-source and open-science development. In WW4, the ownership principle is formalized in the following way.
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For each building block of WW4, a unique “owner” is identified.
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When new code, tools, or options are submitted to WW4, the submitter tentatively identified as the code owner.
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The owner is responsible for any issues with their contribution, in particular for bugs, assisting with porting to new hardware and compilers if needed, and for general support. The latter may include questions from users about this code or data, and issues identified with this code or data.
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Ownership can be transferred, either by mutual agreement, or if existing users and developers want to retain pieces of WW4 for which the original owner is no longer available (see next point).
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If an owner can no longer be identified, the corresponding part of the code may be removed from the model.
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For this to work effectively, code owners for WW4 are expected to participate in regular WW4 code management meetings, which are tentatively organized by NWS.
To facilitate development of WW4 from WW3, the initial ownership mapping is based on WW3 model options, executable programs, and coupling interfaces. Creating such an initial mapping allows for straightforward management of what will be ported from WW3 to WW4, by whom and when. In particular, only porting code with ownership facilitates effectively cleaning up obsolescent code in WW3. This is documented in the Mapping WW3 to WW4 and Ownership page. We intend to keep this page around after WW4 reaches maturity, in particular to document the mapping from WW3 options to WW4 options.
A comprehensive ownership database is maintained as from the start of the development of WW4 code, and is documented in the WW4 Ownership Tables page. The latter page is the up-to-date- authoritative Ownership database for WW4.
