Software Sustainability: Putting Practice First

Description

Software is fundamental to research. From short, thrown-together temporary scripts, through an abundance of complex spreadsheets analysing collected data, to the hundreds of software engineers and millions of lines of code behind international efforts such as the Large Hadron Collider and the Square Kilometre Array, software has made an invaluable contribution to advancing our research knowledge. The UK-based Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) is a unique, leading international authority on research software sustainability, working with researchers, funders, software engineers, managers, and other stakeholders across the research spectrum. Our mission is to cultivate better, more sustainable, research software to enable world-class research: “Better software, better research”. Good software practices create better software, and that better software improves the reproducibility and reusability of research. This talk will introduce of the vision, goals and activities of the SSI, present the outcomes of a large-scale research software survey carried out at 15 Russell Group universities in the UK, highlight our work on careers for Research Software Engineers and Software Carpentry & Data Carpentry training for researchers, and give a brief overview of best practices for working with research software and provide top tips to help with selection, development, maintenance, reuse and recognition of software.

Period	25 Oct 2016
Held at	Blue Brain Project, EPFL, Switzerland