1. Software Sustainability Institute www.software.ac.uk CW2016 Hackday Technical considerations or How to score extra marks with the judges CW2016 March 22 nd, 2016 Steve Crouch, Research Software Group Lead, SSI s.crouch@software.ac.uk

2. Software Sustainability Institute www.software.ac.uk Enjoy yourselves! vs Fun! (?) Formal ?

3. Software Sustainability Institute www.software.ac.uk Before you start… How to approach development?  e.g. clarify requirements, planning, architectural design, implementation choices?  Who will be responsible for what?  Consider short development cycles Use of collaborative tools  GoogleDocs  Slack

4. Software Sustainability Institute www.software.ac.uk What to consider when coding? Which aspects to focus on?  e.g. maintainability, readability, usability, reliability, reproducibility, performance? What’s going to make it easier for you to continue after the hackday?

5. Software Sustainability Institute www.software.ac.uk Implementation and Infrastructure / reproducibility Thou should use version control!  When to check stuff in, how open, what to put in it e.g. code, data, even… unit tests?  Short cycles - always have something to demo  Documentation? Issue tracking? For reproducibility  Ideally: a README, how to configure, build and run 1 st Tag 2 nd Tag 3 rd Tag

6. Software Sustainability Institute www.software.ac.uk Implementation and Infrastructure Value of work should be clear – or lose marks!  Context - building on existing work, starting something new?  What does your software/scripts do?  How does it benefit others, and who?  What’s novel about your work?  Have 100-150 word summary in README

7. Software Sustainability Institute www.software.ac.uk Generally… Criteria: future potential What about after the Hackday?  Mention some interesting ideas for future steps in your README (or a GitHub issue?)!  Think about which license to use early e.g. Apache, BSD, GPL, LGPL, … Start as you mean to go on!  What practices? How open?  Don’t have too much, but how much is enough?  Hackday as microcosm for long-term?  Decide early, adhere early, revise later!