Sustainable Research Software Hand-Over

[BrandonEdwards]

Title: Sustainable Research Software Hand-Over

Study Link: https://openresearchsoftware.metajnl.com/articles/10.5334/jors.307/
Citation: @doi:10.5334/jors.307

Citation must follow the Manubot-style citation. Leave it in blank, if unsure.

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

• research software
• replicability
• open science

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

This paper provides some recommended best practices for research software handover, both for small pieces of software and large pieces of software. They touch on topics such as having an appropriate duration of handover time which includes ensuring availability of code, proper execution environment for the new code owner, minimally usable documentation, and working examples. There are some differences in best-practices between what they consider "small projects", which they define as projects maintained by one author, and "large projects", which they define as projects maintained by multiple authors/institutions.

Any comments or notes?

They only list "version control" as being an optional recommendation, but still have it "strongly recommended", citing reasons such as ability to track changes from the past, tag states of repositories, and my personal favourite and one I am very interested in at the moment: associating experiments during the publication process, that is being able to point to a specific version of a piece of software in the publication process.