By Mike Jackson.

SICSA (the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance) aims for Scotland to become a world leader in informatics and computer science.  Last Thursday, I ventured west to a rather damp Glasgow so that I could attend the SICSA PhD Conference 2012. The conference allows PhD students across Scotland to come together, share experiences and develop new skills. The Software Sustainability Institute was invited to run a session on sharing code and data by the University of Edinburgh's Guido Sanguinetti.

Rather than dictate what I wanted to talk about, I asked the students to vote on the subjects my talk should cover. The most popular subject were why it is important for research that code and data are shared, copyright and licencing, and different types of open-source licence. After these talks, I gave some practical advice on how to cite and describe software. This was most useful, because it was the first time that I have talked about these subjects since writing up my recommendations (see my blog article on How to describe the software you used in your research - top ten tips and our green paper Exactly what software did you use? - How to describe the software you used in your research).

Very few students voted to learn more about testing. Despite its lack of popularity, this is a very important subject so I took on the role of benevolent dictator... and talked about testing. I also described why version control is an essential tool for science ("second only to the brain", one student commented) and the utility of code reviews in finding bugs.

On behalf of the Institute I'd like to thank Guido and SICSA for the opportunity to present and the students who attended and provided a number of examples for use in future talks.