Posted by admin on 19 July 2016 - 11:53am

By Steve Crouch, Research Software Group Lead.

This article was originally published on Jisc's Research Data Spring blog on 30 June 2016.

Sustainability is increasingly becoming recognised as a must-have goal in the development of research software. Earlier this year, I undertook a sustainability assessment of the projects that had reached the second phase of the Jisc's Research Data Spring. It is particularly heartening that Jisc has sustainability high on the agenda across its portfolio of software projects, and that the projects themselves are embracing this ideal with such enthusiasm.

The Institute’s Research Software Group has conducted over 60 consultancy activities with projects producing research software, and a part of that work often involves an assessment of the software's sustainability. Typically, this means taking an in-depth look at the software itself—the team's development practices, its documentation and web presence, how the software is provided to users and developers and how it is supported—and providing recommendations for how these aspects could be improved.

Sustainability is a key consideration for the projects, which are expected to develop and implement plans for sustainability beyond the project's Jisc funding lifetime. By providing a 'sustainability snapshot' of the work prior to the end of the projects' second phase, they can focus on identified issues well before the end of their funding.

A lightweight assessment

For this activity, we undertook a more lightweight general assessment across the 11 projects to give them pointers, focusing on technical aspects, for improvement in the later stages. Having been on the judging panel at the sandpit event and at the end of phase one, it's been great to see the projects taking sustainability on board so early. This gave me a chance to see how far the projects had come in addressing sustainability.

Although the projects had only started their second stage of funding, the progress made was very impressive. When the level of funding and their accomplishments are considered, their initiative represents tremendous value.

Sustainability through community engagement

The degree of community engagement, a key indicator of the success of post-project sustainability, was particularly strong across all the projects. The number of community workshops aimed at bringing new stakeholders on board was impressive. A notable example is the Clipper project, which demonstrated an exceptional level of engagement. At the time of assessment, there were no less than seven reported community workshops, and to top it all their blog was well-informed and frequently updated and exhibited a very high level of transparency with project activities and findings.

On a related note, an important part of engaging the community is the extent to which the software itself is openly developed and made available. Software development projects are increasingly expected to make their software available to the wider community—by the community themselves and funders— and the Jisc Data Spring projects do not disappoint. All those producing software have developed the source code and made it available using publicly accessible revision control hosting services such as GitHub. DataVault stood out in its excellent use of GitHub issues for highlighting development work that has been achieved and still needs to be addressed, which is great for transparency, as well as showing development activity and technical progress. Although making the software available as open source was expected of the projects it’s great to see they followed through with such enthusiasm. By adopting this approach and publishing code early, they are preparing their software for a life and reuse beyond the Data Spring funding horizon.

Looking ahead

Of course, there is always more to do. To further help the projects along the path towards sustainability, Jisc held a webinar in June 2016 to discuss ideas about funding models for a post-project future. Whilst the projects have already considered many aspects of sustainability, the webinar gave them an opportunity to get a broader picture and consider other ideas.

In addition to providing a comprehensive introduction to some of the funding for developing open source software, the webinar covered examples of open source tools and what they have put in place to support themselves. This led to highly valuable and engaging discussions, including the finer points and some of the pitfalls of licensing, such as the importance of ensuring that the software’s license is compatible with the licenses of any third-party dependencies (e.g. libraries bundled with the software).

It’s going to be great to see how far the projects have come in the third and final phase later this year!

.