Putting software sustainability into practice
A short update on "Best Practices for Sustainable Software" project activities
The project team behind the TDCC-NES project “Best Practices for Sustainable Software” has been busy with getting the NES community input on the tools and resources they are developing within the project. They have organized several interactive sessions with that intention, starting with a workshop at ICT.OPEN 2024 titled Putting software sustainability into practice (for NES). In this workshop, a curated list of resources for making research software more sustainable, reproducible and reusable was shared with participants. They then had the opportunity to discuss their usability and quality and the feedback will be used to improve them. Examples of resources included a registry for research software, tools for software citation, templates, etc.
The project team has continued these efforts by organizing walk-in sessions. The first one was organized at Utrecht University and the most recent one at University of Twente, as a bring your code session. These sessions are an invitation to researchers to share code with the project team and get suggestions on making it more reliable, easier to reuse, and overall more effective for themselves and others, and receive guidance on Software Management Plans (SMP) for their projects. They offer the participants a chance to gain insights, support, and actionable suggestions to improve their code's impact and FAIRness.
The project team will continue with the walk-in sessions so don’t waste this opportunity and find them at the University of Groningen (3rd of July) or at Tilburg University (19th of September), where they will be going next.
In the meantime, start exploring some of the first outputs of the project here - SS-NES github.com, or look into the upcoming chapter on Software Documentation for the Turing Way handbook to which the project members contributed.
