Research software development and maintenance often suffers from a lack of quality assurance realization. This might result from the fact that the different actors involved are either not aware of the benefits that applying quality practices bring along, or not keen to adhere to them as they might increase the burden on the software life cycle. Thus, the main purpose of this document is to provide a lightweight and practical approach to educate and, ultimately, achieve quality in the development of research software.
The Common Software Quality Assurance Baseline Criteria establishes the minimum viable set of quality requirements that shall be covered when tackling any software development project, but mainly oriented to research. Additional best practices and recommendations are also defined to increase the value --reliability, interoperability-- of the final product. In order to discern among them, the RFC 2119 convention is used throughout the document, thus adding adequate information about the criticality of each requirement.
A citable version of this manuscript is available at http://hdl.handle.net/10261/160086
The current baseline has been elaborated and extended based on the first-hand experiences extracted from several European-funded research projects for software development. We aim to consolidate the quality guidelines as a reference point for future research projects, setting a path for sustainability and knowledge transfer. This goal can only be achieved through a open and collaborative effort. Consequently, any contribution is welcomed and will be considered for inclusion.
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The Common Software Quality Assurance Baseline Criteria is licensed under a
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The INDIGO-DataCloud, DEEP-Hybrid-DataCloud, eXtreme-DataCloud and EOSC-Synergy projects have received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 653549, 777435, 777367 and 857647 respectively.