Sorry, I should have given some examples.

I'm talking about the secondary work that goes into software, things like environment setup, building artifacts, producing ancillary tooling, and deployment.

I know these might be considered disparate, and I'm intentionally omitting topics that I know are studied, such as formal verification and fuzzing.

I was joking with my spouse, who is a methodologist in medicine, about making a group of researchers set up environments for working on various large open source projects as an example.

Perhaps all of this crosses into operations research?