Abstract
The integrated Rule Oriented Data System (iRODS) provides an excellent use case for exploring sustainable software development. The iRODS data grid software is the product of a 20-year development effort that relied on funding from multiple federal agencies. Each agency needed infrastructure to support multiple scientific disciplines. Each discipline potentially required multiple types of data management (sharing, publication, preservation, and processing). The iRODS software was developed as generic infrastructure that could be tuned to implement the desired data support mechanisms. Active engagement of the user communities was encouraged through open source collaborative development. Based on the successful application of the software across the multiple disciplines, we make three claims about sustainable software development: 1) that the success of the software is dependent on having a highly extensible architecture; 2) that extensible software enables infrastructure re-use across domains; and 3) that consortium based development enables long-term support for software infrastructure.