The Software Sustainability Institute has expertise in a wide variety of areas related to software. We provide consultancy, training courses and speakers on the subjects listed below.

If you would like to know more, please contact us.

What we do

• What is the Software Sustainability Institute?
• An introduction to software sustainability

Software and software development

• Software sustainability (in general)
• Software preservation
• Software maintainability
• Managing sustainability into software (tools, techniques, why it's important to sustain)
• Guiding principles for writing software documentation
• Using open standards for software interoperability
• Best practice in delivering resources via web services

Software build and test

• Build tools with a focus on Ant
• Testing with JUnit and Java/Testing in Python
• The importance of test coverage

Software evaluation

• Usability evaluation (heuristic and cooperative)
• Sustainability evaluation
• Introduction to the Software Ontology Project and ontological properties for software
• Reviewing the significant properties of software
• How to evaluate your own software

Open source

• Open source as it relates to research software
• Open source software copyright licensing and development
• Adopting open source software for long-term use

Project infrastructure and repositories

• Setting up and managing a SourceForge project
• Setting up an SVN
• Ticketing for issues
• Introduction to Clouds
• Introduction to Grids

Project management

• Being a Development Manager and running a Development Portfolio
• Project management for research software
• Using Trac for project management
• Writing software funding proposals (EU and UK)
• Coordinating European projects
• Running agile and distributed projects
• How to build, run and keep successful teams
• Moving projects from research into production (focusing on both technical and politics aspects)

Advocacy

• Need for software skills in the research community
• Software development policy for UK research

Publicity

• What's in a name - choosing project and software names
• Writing successful guides from an ironic and contrary viewpoint (it's important!)
• Community engagement for research software
• Publicity isn't a dirty word - publicising software and software projects
• Running a software blog
• How to write for software projects
• How to run unconference style events
• How to run a workshop