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This is the title of a keynote presentation by Neil Chue Hong (Director of the UK’s Software Sustainability Institute) at the International Symposium on Grids and Clouds 2015 in Taipei, Taiwan (March 15-20, 2015). Neil emphasizes the crucial point that startups and software research have many survival rules in common, but one of these surpasses others in importance, and that is: understand your users. He describes in detail four stages making software sustainable by understanding users, and gives real world case studies for each:
[See also the transcript of the talk at at http://www.slideshare.net/npch/why-developing-research-software-is-like-a-startup-and-why-this-matters]
A related issue is that scientific research is all about reaching researchers. Software needs a user base to support funding proposals and to encourage contributions. While the above two statements may be obvious, they impose conditions on software providers to make this happen. Neil calls these conditions the four Golden Rules: