What is a research software analyst?

This month Arianna Ciula writes about her role at King’s Digital Lab as a research software analyst (RSA). King’s Digital Lab (KDL) is an embedded RSE team in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London. How is being an RSA different from being a research software engineer (RSE)? What skills are needed for this role? How widespread is the role in UK dRTP teams?

What is a research software analyst?

Defining the role

The RSA role is derived from business analysis good practices anchored in SFIA. It maps onto a range of roles in the Agile software development life cycle (SDLC), including research analyst, project coordinator, tester, team leader and research developer.

What does the RSA do at King’s?

During the feasibility assessment phase of a new project, the RSA elicits technical requirements. This is a collaborative process to:

• understand research objectives in a technology-agnostic manner.
• iterate, asking many questions, examining data samples as needed.
• evaluate options and approaches, integrating input from the rest of the RSE team.
• formalise prioritisation of requirements, in collaboration with the RSE team and project team.
• plan not only the project, but also for long term software and systems maintenance after the project ends.

During the active design and development phase, the RSA:

• Leads the project initiation process.
• Owns subsequent project reviews and analysis work.
• Manages communication and formal agreements between the project and RSE teams.
• Monitors prioritisation, capacity planning and substantial project changes.
• Contributes to data deposition and dissemination of project outputs.
• Contributes to the project review to improve subsequent performance.

Key skills for RSAs

In order to excel, the RSA relies on:

• knowledge of research domains, specific technical methods, organisational and sector context.
• experience (especially of collaboration).
• analytical skills, as applied to research questions and in framing technical requirements.
• influencing skills.

Key skills for an RSA are:

• Communication across skillsets and domains
• Analysis
• Consensus building
• Prioritisation and organising team capacity
• Awareness of funding context
• Network building and facilitation
• Diplomacy and negotiation
• Building KDL’s visibility via outreach and other engagement activities.

RSA roles at other institutions

While well-known and professionalised in industry (as business analysts or increasingly as product managers), Higher Education Institutions in the UK tend not to have RSA as a formal role. Instead the tasks above are carried out by RSEs themselves, by other technical roles (e.g. Scrum masters at the University of Manchester) or by data roles (e.g. data scientists at Alan Turing Institute; data stewards at UCL).

Professionalising a separate RSA role has the advantage of freeing RSEs (and other members of the Solution Development Team such as UI/UX designers) to focus on technical design and development. It also enables scaling of grant capture and parallel work on multiple projects in different stages of conceptualisation and development.

Separating overall group/lab management (the responsibility of the lab manager at KDL) from portfolio-level project management (the responsibility of the project manager at KDL) from project-level project management (the responsibility of the RSAs) enables accountability in financial management while keeping the deliverables close to the research questions and concerns (the main responsibility of the RSAs). This separation also allows for both lab level and project-level capacity planning.

Last but not least, it also allows the RSE team to evolve analysis processes around its SDLC (e.g. feasibility assessment, planning and documentation, decommissioning). It does however require some organisational investment beyond the better known RSE roles, including developing career pathways and provision for training and mobility across roles.

Find out more about about how this role works at King’s Digital Lab

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