The Software Sustainability Institute

By Stephan Druskat, Tyler Whitehouse, Alessandro Felder, Sorrel Harriet, Benjamin Lee This post is part of the CW19 speed blog posts series. Good documentation is a fundamental aspect of research software. It influences how easy-to-use, extendable, and by extension how sustainable, a piece of software is. In this blog post, we are interested in addressing issues surrounding good documentation of research software and how they can be approached in a general sense, that may be applicable to a wide research software engineering audience.

By Sarah Gibson, Anna Krystalli, Arshad Emmambux, Alexandra Simperler, Tom Russell, and Doug Lowe Like history, reproducible data processing is just one, um, thing after another. When the number of tools, models or steps in a process grows beyond a handful, we start to feel the need for some automation or structure. Running the same sequence of tools over multiple data? Capturing the steps of an analysis for collaborators or students to repeat, modify and extend? Conducting a scenario analysis using coupled models? Workflow, pipeline and model coupling tools all respond to the need for reliable, reproducible analysis.