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Lesson

Building Better Research Software

This short course is teaching tools and practices for producing and sharing quality, sustainable and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) research software to support open and reproducible research. The course can be delivered over 2 full or 4 half days.

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Lesson metadata

Slug building-better-research-software
Pathway Maintaining & Sustaining Software
Subtopic —
Skill Level Intermediate
OSS Role(s) Contributor, Maintainer
Resource Type tutorial
Time Required 11m
Author The Carpentries Incubator
License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Keywords english fair fair-software research-software
Language(s) en

Additional metadata

Contributor Todd
Creative Work Status Under development
Date Created 2023-10-03
Date Modified 2025-12-23
Date Published 2025-12-23
Domain General Open Source
Identifier https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/better-research-software
Learning Objectives For researchers wanting to adhere to FAIR practies. Course provides code for exercises. Introduce what FAIR means especially in relationship to code written for research purposes. Course is comprehensive covering the research code lifecylce, describing good practices at each stage: Creating a github project (along with practices to help with version control); Practices to help with reproductibility (eg creating reproducible environment for other reseaerches, dependencies trees, VMs); Practices to annotate code to ensure that others can understand and use the code; Code structure recommendations; Testing and Documentation practices
Ospo Relevance Core
Prerequisite Notes This is a python based course | pre-requisites | Course lists like version control in git and command line, but the course does cover the information with exercises for the student | python-packaging | python-packaging-for-beginners | python-package-development-best-practices | python-basics | collaboration-in-open-research-projects | introduction-to-git | introduction-to-unix-command-line | introduction-to-version-control-with-git
Sorting Id 24
Topic Research

CI/CD for Research Software with GitLab CI

Intermediate

Continuous Integration and Delivery with GitHub Actions

Intermediate

Effective Code Review

Intermediate

Finding Users for Your Project

Beginner

Intermediate Python Development

Intermediate

Intermediate Research Software Development Skills (Python) Lesson Material

Intermediate