A free two-day technical deep dive where our Research Software Engineering team works with your group to optimise your research software practices and ensure the long-term reproducibility of your computational work.
What is a research software culture consultation?
Research Software Culture Consultation is a high-level technical deep dive designed to align your group’s computational workflows with the standards of modern, open, and reproducible science. We offer a free two-day technical consultation to review your group's current computational practice followed by a set of plans and advice to improve your group's computational workflows.
We have a limited number of spots available. To register your interest, please contact us via the form above. Please include a summary of your current practices/workflows.
Why does research software culture matter?
During the deep dive, we work alongside your group to examine the critical pillars of your research software infrastructure. We focus on:
- Workflow Integration: Understanding the specific software tools your group uses and how they are integrated into your daily research activities.
- Version Control & Integrity: Reviewing existing practices for tracking code changes to ensure a transparent and clear research trail.
- Knowledge Continuity: Addressing how software maintenance is handed over when group members transition out of the group.
- Feedback & Communication: Evaluating the channels between those developing research code and those using it, ensuring bugs and unexpected behaviours are efficiently reported and resolved.
- Dissemination & Reach: Identifying optimal pathways for sharing your software with collaborators and the wider academic community to maximise research impact.
| PhD Students | Postdoctoral researchers | Principal Investigators | Research Staff |
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What do you get?
Based on the consultation, we advise on resources, training or people to get in touch with to support the adoption of modern, sustainable and robust software development practices by the whole team.
Impact & Researcher Feedback
We partner with research teams to not only build robust software but to foster sustainable engineering practices within their research groups. Read about our collaboration with the Virtual Ecosystem team (Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London - View the Virtual Ecosystem Project):
The Research Software Engineering team has been involved with the development of the Virtual Ecosystem almost from the start of the project. We already knew enough to talk the talk about good software engineering practices: code review processes, continuous integration, unit testing and code quality assurance tools. However, having the RSE team within the project made sure that we actually walked the walk of good software culture. A large part of that has been in enabling us to build software engineering skills across the team, giving us the independence to maintain good practices and high quality code. The RSE team have also been there throughout to help review code and implement new features, providing a wealth of timely feedback and wider programming experience that has been invaluable to the success of the project.