Top 10 metrics for life science software good practices

F1000Res. 2016 Aug 16:5:ELIXIR-2000. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.9206.1. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Metrics for assessing adoption of good development practices are a useful way to ensure that software is sustainable, reusable and functional. Sustainability means that the software used today will be available - and continue to be improved and supported - in the future. We report here an initial set of metrics that measure good practices in software development. This initiative differs from previously developed efforts in being a community-driven grassroots approach where experts from different organisations propose good software practices that have reasonable potential to be adopted by the communities they represent. We not only focus our efforts on understanding and prioritising good practices, we assess their feasibility for implementation and publish them here.

Keywords: ELIXIR; Evaluation; Impact; Metrics; Software, Best Practices; Sustainability.

Grants and funding

MC and HA are strategically core funded by UK’s BBSRC. BGO is funded by the BE-BASIC grant F08.005. NCH was supported by EPSRC, BBSRC and ESRC Grant EP/N006410/1 for the UK Software Sustainability Institute. The work was part of the ELIXIR-EXCELERATE project, funded by the European Commission within the Research Infrastructures programme of Horizon 2020, grant agreement number 676559.