Your new project (or software or product or anything) needs a name. Welcome to hours of head scratching, playing with acronyms, mashing words into unnatural forms and asking your friends and family ‘what does GreatWare say to you?’ Now imagine spending the next few years of your life on the project only to find that someone else is using the same name – and they used it first. When starting a project, checking that the name you’ve chosen is unique feels like an extra, unwanted headache, but it is well worth the effort.

You will find that development of new code and maintenance of existing code is easier if you adopt best practices that have evolved over many years. Exactly how these practices should be implemented will depend on the nature of your project. If you would like help with best practice, the Software Sustainability Institute can advise you on how to proceed.

In general, there are two guiding principles to keep in mind when approaching a new software development project:

• Be aware of your goal
• Be prepared for change

Readable source code is vital

If our peers are to quickly and easily understand our source code, it must be readable. The Software Sustainability Institute can provide advice and guidance on producing readable source code. We can even review your source code to see whether it can be improved.

When writing software, you’re writing something that others will use. And in these days of off-the-shelf components, you may be using or bundling other peoples’ software too. This handy guide describes some simple, yet proven, ways in which you can successfully make the life of your users an absolute misery, incur the wrath of your fellow developers and make software lawyers salivate.

This guide provides best practice, guidance and recommendations to funders of research projects that potentially involve the use of cloud computing. It may also be of interest to senior managers and research directors. An understanding of the potential benefits of cloud computing and the issues arising from its use can contribute towards a more effective exploitation of cloud computing within research, particularly as the community seeks to clarify its strategic plan for the UK Research Computing Ecosystem.

This guide is intended to help answer a range of questions, such as:

• If a researcher or institution requests money for cloud computing resources, what issues should I bear in mind as a programme manager?
• If a researcher or institution asks for funding for hardware, how should I assess this request to provision new infrastructure?
• What do I need to consider if investigating the provisioning of a shared cloud computing infrastructure that can be made available to researchers across a range of institutions?

Many scientific codes in research are developed in an organic way: you need a feature, so you code a feature. Perhaps it is a command line program that now needs to process the input data differently and output result data to a file in a different format. So for convenience, you code the extension in a single location in your program. It works, you understand it (and others can understand it!), and it is well tested. It's good, right? Maybe. But let's take a more thorough look...

From preserving research results, to storing photos for the benefit of future generations, the importance of preserving data is gaining widespread acceptance. But what about software?

It’s easy to focus on the preservation of data and other digital objects, like images and music samples, because they are generally seen as end products. The software that is needed to access the preserved data is frequently overlooked in the preservation process. But without the right software, it could be impossible to access the preserved data - which undermines the reason for storing the data in the first place.  

This guide is targeted at people who are responsible for preserving data and digital objects on behalf of others. These people typically work for libraries, museums and archives.

Our goal in this guide is to explain why long-term software preservation is necessary, what needs to be understood before software can be preserved and how to get started with the preservation process

A checklist for developers

To get people using your software as quickly and painlessly as possible, you should invest a little of your time preparing everything your users will need before you release your software. This guide describes some simple things you can do to improve your users' experience of your software.

By Tobias Schlauch, Carina Haupt and the software engineering group at the German Aerospace Centre. 

This guide is part of the Research Software Camp: research accessibility web content series. 

Based on the "Sustainable Software Development for Researchers" alias "Bring Your Own Script and Make It Ready for Publication" workshop, this guide is a short overview about the steps recommended to make your code sustainable, enabling others to use and modify it. 

Depending on the type of recording you are going to do, the amount of post-processing expected and your technical knowledge about video recordings, you will have to plan which recording tool(s) to use, any permissions from the people that are going to be in your recording, where you are going to store your recording (video files tend to be very big), and how you are going to publish and share your recordings. You will also need sufficiently powerful hardware at your disposal to process the recording, along with sufficient disk space to store the original recording and any derived output. As always, make sure you keep the original video in case you make a mistake and have to go back (do not overwrite it) and save your derived output often in case the application crashes.