Barely sufficient practices in scientific computing

[wavingtowaves]

Barely sufficient practices in scientific computing

Study Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2021.100206
Citation: @10.1016/j.patter.2021.100206

Suggested keywords that help identify the relevance of this paper to Ecology and Evolution:

• Code development
• Git

Which areas of expertise are particularly relevant to the paper?

• ecology and/or evolution;
• biostatistics;
• informatics and computational research;
• open science and reproducibility;
• other: replace_with_your_suggestion.

Summary

• The authors propose a MINIMAL set of software developing guidelines to enable FAIR research.
• They use the acronym ":ADVerTS" for 'barely sufficient' software practices because it should not be expected that people interested in pursuing scientific questions are going to be commercial-grade software developers. Availability, documenting, version control, test, support.
• Software needs to be licensed for re-use
• Contents of readme file and documentation should be good enough that a motivated person with no prior knowledge can get code up and running.
• "Reuse is almost inevitable and should be planned for".

Any comments or notes?