Quick tips for making your software outlive your job
Abstract
Loss of key personnel has always been a risk for research software projects. Key members of a team may have to step away due to a change in national or university funding, due to illness or burnout, or because they are simply changing jobs. Today, political and financial changes are putting large numbers of researchers out of work simultaneously, both in the UK and abroad, potentially leaving large amounts of research software abandoned and destabilising necessary digital research infrastructure. We present ten tips to help researchers ensure that the software they have built will continue to be usable after they have left their present job, for any reason. These techniques, methods, and best practices were collectively sourced from researchers from dozens of universities across the globe, and are now being improved upon in a ReSA Task Force. The tips shown here will enable individual researchers and labs to position their work in a way that makes it more sustainable and usable going forward, resulting in a more resilient research software ecosystem.Acknowledgements The main author of this work, and another author, were funded through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Bill Branan, Chang Liao, Christoph Treude, Daniel Morillo-Cuadrado, Daniel R. McCloy, David Eyers, David Lippert, Elena Findley-de Regt, Eman Abdullah AlOmar, Ethan P. White, Fang Liu, Geoffrey Lentner, Georg Link, Greg Wilson, Jan Ainali, Jonathan Guyer, Jouni Helske, Kaylea Champion, Kris Bubendorfer, Mala Kumar, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Paola Corrales, Phani Velicheti, Pierre Marshall, Pieter Huybrechts, Priyanka Ojha, Sylwester Arabas, Tobias Augspurger, Tommy Guy, Yanina Bellini Saibene, and others contributed to the original work. Michelle Barker, Daniel Katz, and Kim Hartley helped with setting up the ReSA Task Force. A recording of this session is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/GxGLzBS1ohU