What are best practices for research software documentation?
Latest version published on 21 June, 2019.
By Stephan Druskat, Tyler Whitehouse, Alessandro Felder, Sorrel Harriet, Benjamin Lee This post is part of the CW19 speed blog posts series. Good documentation is a fundamental aspect of research software. It influences how easy-to-use, extendable, and by extension how sustainable, a piece of software is. In this blog post, we are interested in addressing issues surrounding good documentation of research software and how they can be approached in a general sense, that may be applicable to a wide research software engineering audience.Reproducibly producing data from workflows, pipelines and coupled models
Latest version published on 19 June, 2019.
By Sarah Gibson, Anna Krystalli, Arshad Emmambux, Alexandra Simperler, Tom Russell, and Doug Lowe Like history, reproducible data processing is just one, um, thing after another. When the number of tools, models or steps in a process grows beyond a handful, we start to feel the need for some automation or structure. Running the same sequence of tools over multiple data? Capturing the steps of an analysis for collaborators or students to repeat, modify and extend? Conducting a scenario analysis using coupled models? Workflow, pipeline and model coupling tools all respond to the need for…Research Software Communities: Organising events to help develop and grow your community
Latest version published on 18 June, 2019.
By Simon Hettrick, Jeremy Cohen, James Graham, Carina Haupt, Connah McKendrick, David Gillespie This post is part of the CW19 speed blog posts series. The number of research software communities is growing rapidly - local communities, regional communities and national communities are all gaining recognition and interest amongst the large number of developers and researchers who write software to support/undertake research. Communities can provide a wide variety of activities to support their members but events offer the main opportunity to meet and interact with other community members.…Curriculum Development Sessions at CCMcr19
Latest version published on 7 June, 2019.
By Toby Hodges, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Heidelberg, Germany. You might have seen that the full programme for CarpentryConnect Manchester 2019 was published recently. As well as exciting keynote talks and plenty of breakout sessions covering important topics relating to teaching and developing skills in research software, the conference promises to be particularly relevant for anyone interested in developing high-quality teaching material or enhancing their computational skills.Inaugural meeting of 2019 Software Sustainability Institute Fellows
Latest version published on 6 June, 2019.
By Laura James, Software Sustainability Institute Fellow On Tuesday I was up at the University of Manchester for the first meeting of the 2019 Fellowship. The Institute gave us a great introduction and it was good how much they were keen to hear from us what we needed by way of supportAn institutional perspective on publishing open code
Latest version published on 8 August, 2019.
By Thomas Etherington, Spatial Modeller - Ecology, Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research, and Institute Fellow. By openly publishing their code, scientists make their science more reproducible – which is a very good thing! Recently, a group of staff where I work at Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research wanted to establish an institutional GitHub account so that we would have a place to publish the code we were generating. However, while there are many institutional benefits for encouraging the publication of scientific code, there are also institutional considerations around things such as…Fellows Inaugural Meeting 2019
Latest version published on 4 June, 2019.
By Raniere Silva, Software Sustainability Institute. Usually, Fellows would meet face to face for the first time during the Inaugural Meeting but this was a special year and some of them met during Collaborations Workshop 2019. On 21 May 2019, this year’s cohort of Fellows got together in Manchester to receive orientation from staff and introduce themselves to their peers.Jamovi - Community Driven, User-friendly Software For The Masses
Latest version published on 3 June, 2019.
By Jonathon Love, Jamovi. Jamovi is a user-friendly, statistical spreadsheet, built on top of R, with a mission to not just provide free easy-to-use statistical software, but to decentralise the publishing of statistical methods as much as possible. Most of us are familiar with the success of R, CRAN, and the R community. CRAN is a repository of thousands of different statistical methods published by as diverse a group of researchers as anyone can imagine. However, when we consider graphical software – that is, user-friendly software with a user-interface – these usually have a strong…Building a long term sustainable future for your software through Outreach - Part II
Latest version published on 31 May, 2019.
By Mario Antonioletti, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre and The Software Sustainability Institute. In this second post, we argue that in order to have a sustainable future you must not only employ good software techniques but also ensure that you create a future workforce that can develop and/or want to use your software.Building a long term sustainable future for your software through Outreach : Part I
Latest version published on 31 May, 2019.
By Mario Antonioletti, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre and The Software Sustainability Institute. Producing sustainable software is not just about employing good practice – e.g. using a revision control system, documentation, testing, etc. – but also about ensuring that, for a long term future, we can generate motivated, well-trained developers that will continue to contribute to and develop your software, as well as creating a potential set of savvy end users that will want to use it.