Software quality

In the spirit of open science, we’re passionate advocates for sustainable software. And as software becomes more important in academia, so too does its quality and sustainability. In short, better research software leads to better, more sustainable research. For researchers to get the most value from software, we believe it needs to be developed in an open process. 

And in the spirit of open science, the eScience Center is committed to this approach. Part of this is about sharing best practices. Including those concerning technical aspects: guidelines for sustainable and reproducible software development, software citation and more. To help researchers and support staff get started, we maintain the community-endorsed website fair-software.eu, with practical recommendations on making software more open and sustainable. We also partner with the UK’s Turing Institute, which has an extensive guide on the skills, tools and best practices required for reproducible research. Frequent and substantial contributions are made by our own Research Software Engineers (RSEs). 

By advocating for software quality, we aim to strengthen the sustainability and reusability of software and digital technologies beyond the scope of individual projects. And that’s a great thing for everyone.

Find out about how software quality was an important part of our nlppln project, a tool to build workflows for text mining.