A set of Common Software Quality Assurance Baseline Criteria for Research Projects - Orviz, Lopez, Duma, David, Gomez, and Donvito

This resource first appeared in issue #49 on 06 Nov 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Software Development

Coming out of the EOSC Synergy effort, an extensive checklist of criteria for “production strength” research code, to be e.g. deployed as a service to communities in the INDIGO Data Cloud. The criteria are broken down into categories:

Licensing
Code Workflow
Code Management
Code Style
Code Metadata
Unit Testing
Functional Testing
Integration Testing
Documentation
Security
Code Review
Automated Deployment

In most areas the actual recommendations aren’t that opinionated - e.g. processes must exist and be documented but they aren’t generally specified. This makes sense for a field as broad as research computing.

I haven’t seen such a comprehensive list before; this is a good conversation starting point conversation for any mature research software product.