Have you developed something useful, and want to build a community around it? Before you encourage people to find you and your project, you need to make both easily findable. It is not hard, but surprisingly many miss or disregard this crucial initial step. You also need to figure out what type of people you want to find, and where they currently are.

Until there is a radical change in the way that academic credit is given, the principal record of scientific research is still the peer-reviewed publication. Given that software is a fundamental part of doing science in the digital age, the question we are often asked is: where can I publish papers which are primarily focused on my scientific software?

The Open Evidence Bank (OEB) is a curated collection of accessible articles and data that contribute to our understanding of the research software landscape. 

Whether for research, administration, learning or teaching, software is an increasingly valuable tool and output, and needs to be managed as such.

This is a briefing paper for project leaders or managers, researchers who program, and research software engineers working on new software projects, and anyone involved in the early stages of a software development project. This paper will help you to consider how you can create a community around your software - taking it from being used only in your own group, then by your collaborators, your wider domain, other domains and then even by the wider public.

Videos are one of the best ways of showcasing software, because it's much more enlightening to see software in action than simply read about it. Videos can attract new users by showing off your software's potential, and video tutorials help users to learn how to use your software. This guide gives a few tips on producing videos for software projects.

You've written some software as part of your research, and you would like others to be able to use it. You've made sure your code is ready for release so there's only one thing left to do: choose a licence.

Software always needs new features or bug fixes. Maintainable software is easy to extend and fix, which encourages the software's uptake and use. We can advise you on the design and development of maintainable software that will benefit both you and your users.

Avoid dependency problems when developing software

When your software needs more functionality, there's no need to waste your time re-inventing the wheel. Instead, you can give your software the functionality it needs by reusing other people's software, such as code libraries or packages. Of course, if you rely on someone else's code, you become reliant on them not changing the code so that it stops working with your software. You can defend against these dependency problems  with some forethought and a bit of research.

In this guide, we will describe how to choose software and develop code to avoid dependency problems.

Why and how to test your code?

Software development doesn't end when the software is written. How can you, and any developers you work with, be sure that your software meets its requirements? Does your software work as expected and will it continue to work over its lifetime?

The important requirement here is showing your software functioning in a demonstrable way so that your code can be seen to meet its test criteria. This is where software testing becomes invaluable. It is very likely that you do some form of software testing already: build the code, run the code in a certain way, and ensure the outputs are as expected. By formalising this process into a set of tests that can be run independently and automatically, you provide a much greater degree of confidence that the software behaves correctly and increase the likelihood that defects are found.

There are some straightforward principles, methods and tools that can greatly assist in the testing process.