Enhancing research with software The Software Sustainability Institute
Software Sustainability Institute
www.software.ac.uk
What we do A national facility for building better software Software helps researchers to improve their work and the speed and accuracy of their results. The Software Sustainability Institute can help you to introduce software into your research or improve the software you already use.
The importance of sustainability Sustainability means that the software you use today will be available - and continue to be improved - in the future. Our goal is to make it easier to rely on software as a foundation of research. We help people learn the skills needed to build better software, and ensure that people get credit and encouragement for developing sustainable software.
Building better software We work with researchers and software developers to develop new software, and improve software that is already in use. Developing sustainable software means following software engineering practices, and understanding and nurturing the community that uses your software. We can help you gain the skills you need through our guides and other resources, or through training and collaboration.
Expert knowledge We work with research projects from all disciplines, which gives us a broad understanding of the problems researchers face when using software. We use this expertise to ensure that you make the right choices about the software you use - and avoid the pitfalls. Choosing sustainable software is about knowing what to look for, and reducing the risks if you make a wrong choice. We can help by reviewing software based on your requirements, or you can review the software yourself with the help of our guides. We also make our expertise available on our website, and in guides and other help materials.
The Software Sustainability Institute
Our work A selection of our current projects
Culham Centre for Fusion Energy Working with Culham, we upgraded established software to streamline the process for visualising plasmas, and developed new code for generating animated visualisations. This work allows fusion researchers to gain a deeper insight into critical aspects of the fusion process. www.ccfe.ac.uk
CPOSS We unified the different codebases that CPOSS uses to predict the behaviour of drugs, fixed bugs and set up project resources for managing the new code. This work has greatly increased the reliability of the CPOSS software and the confidence in the results it generates. www.cposs.org.uk
Community engagement We run two community initiatives to help us identify software and projects that can benefit from our help.
Brain Research & Imaging Centre (BRIC)
SeIUCCR is a network of Community Champions designed to foster dialogue between their communities and the providers of UK infrastructure services.
We advised on changes to software used for anonymising medical images, and reviewed the project’s websites and computing infrastructure. We then worked with BRIC to develop improved code.
The Agents network is a group of experts from a wide range of fields. They communicate to us the requirements of their community.
This work improved the usability of the software, which increased its uptake. We also helped to make the software open source, which made it more maintainable.
www.ngs.ac.uk/seiuccr/home www.software.ac.uk/agents
www.bric.ed.ac.uk
www.software.ac.uk
Our work at a glance Software
Follow our work
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Help you select the right software for your research
Website
www.software.ac.uk
Blog
software.ac.uk/blog
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Review your software and work with you to identify weaknesses and suggest improvements
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Apply software engineering to simply, stabilise and debug your software
YouTube
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Work with you to improve your software development process, from engineering to documentation
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Collaborate with your team to help add new functionality to your software
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Assist development teams in setting up version control, issue tracking, release management, testing and project management resources.
SlideShare
twitter.com/SoftwareSaved slideshare.net/SoftwareSaved youtube.com/SoftwareSaved
Contact us Email
info@software.ac.uk
@SoftwareSaved
Telephone
+44(0)131-650-5030
Resources •
Review your website and other project resources, and suggest improvements
Resources
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Help refine your project processes and work with you to implement them
Guides AskSteve
software.ac.uk/asksteve
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Work with you to develop strategy for outreach and community engagement
Resources
software.ac.uk/resources
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Provide training materials to help researchers learn essential softwaredevelopment skills
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Make our expertise available in guides, case studies, and other resources
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Solve your development problems on the AskSteve blog
software.ac.uk/resources/guides
www.software.ac.uk
Images courtesy (front to back): The US Army, dennis, NASA Goddard Photo and Video
The Software Sustainability Institute