Dear Einstein Toolkit developers,

As part of an NSF software award, we are planning to perform a study on Software Engineering Practices for Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) software development. The discipline of software engineering focuses on developing techniques and tools to assist developers in efficiently building high-quality and trustworthy software. Code review is one of the important techniques of software engineering defined as a systematic examination of computer source code which intends to find and remove vulnerabilities in the initial development phase and improve software quality. Our plan is to understand the practices, impacts and barriers of code review technique in CSE software development. For this study, we are considering the Einstein Toolkit, yt-project and Brown Dog projects as use cases.

You are invited to participate in this research project because you are a developer of the Einstein Toolkit project. Your participation in this research study is voluntary. You may choose not to participate. If you decide to participate in this research survey, you may withdraw at any time. If you decide not to participate in this study or if you withdraw from participating at any time, you will not be penalized.

The procedure involves filling an online survey that will take approximately 20 minutes. Your responses will be kept confidential, and we do not collect identifying information such as your name, email address, or IP address. The survey questions will be about how you review code, how your code is being reviewed, what are the impacts and expectations, if there are any challenges or barriers, and potential areas of improvement.

We will do our best to keep your information confidential. All data is stored in an electronic format. To help protect your confidentiality, the survey will not contain information that will personally identify you. The results of this study will be used for scholarly purposes only, and may be shared with related project personnel.

If you have any questions about the research study, please contact Gabrielle Allen (gdallen@illinois.edu), Roland Haas (rhaas@illinois.edu), Nasir Eisty (neisty@crimson.ua.edu), Jeffrey Carver (carver@cs.ua.edu), Daniel S. Katz (dskatz@illinois.edu).

This research has been reviewed according to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign IRB procedures for research involving human subjects. If you have any questions about your rights as a participant in this study or any concerns or complaints, please contact the University of Illinois Office for the Protection of Research Subjects at 217-333-2670 <(217)%20333-2670> or via email at irb@illinois.edu.

*Please click on the Survey Link https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfoXRVwLNwaIcx1-XqXEdSB_OSHgWn9qntY7CmgExUxCoyZzw/viewform?usp=sf_link to begin the survey. Please complete the survey by the end of Sunday, August 20.*

Thank you very much!

Best Regards, Nasir - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Nasir Uddin Eisty *PhD Student* *Department of Computer Science* *University of Alabama* *Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA*