Recap DCC event Sustainable Research Software: Challenges & Solutions, 10 May 2023

Development, documentation and community building are important elements of sustainable research software. This became apparent during the first event of its kind organized by the DCC; ‘Sustainable Research Software: Challenges & Solutions’ on 10 May at the Smitsborg.

The event was organized by the UG Digital Competence Centre, in collaboration with the Center for Information Technology (CIT) and eScience Center. Speakers from the University of Groningen and the eScience Center presented their work and the tools they created while discussing how they are related to three important elements of sustainable research software: development, documentation and community building.

Prof. Andrea Capiluppi gave an insightful talk about classification and labeling of software by presenting the results of his team’s paper Antipatterns in software classification taxonomies. dr. Gijs Verdoes Kleijn addressed the challenges in software development for astronomical Big Data science missions. Two talks about literate programming, given by Johan Hidding and Pablo Rodriguez-Sanchez touched upon the importance of reproducibility and reusability of codes created for research. Participants also had the chance to learn more about the tool Entangled, which makes writing literate programs easier by keeping code blocks in markdown up-to-date with generated source files. Fakhereh (Sarah) Alidoost presented a community diagnostic and performance metrics tool called  ESMvalTool. It is used for routine evaluation of Earth system models in CMIP and an example of how a large community successfully maintains a research software. Finally,  Herbert Kruitbosch from the CIT data science team  brought up reusability and reproducibility challenges as well as solutions for code produced for research projects.