Research Software Engineering: A SWEBOK Specialism?

The Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) V4.0 was released in October 2024, introducing new topics to enhance foundational knowledge in software engineering, updating existing knowledge areas, and retiring outdated subjects. It aims to better align related disciplines by reorganising and renaming content within different knowledge areas. Established in 2012, the field of research software engineering has grown rapidly as a movement in many countries. However, there is currently an insufficient transfer of state-of-the-art knowledge from software engineering to research software engineering and domain researchers, and vice versa, in part, leading to an incomplete understanding in software engineering of the domain-specific and general challenges in research software engineering. In this extended abstract, we imagine an alternative SWEBOK where this 12-year history of research software and over 10,000 research software engineers were included.