Posted by j.laird on 9 March 2022 - 10:00am 

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

One of the many opportunities to start a new collaboration during the Collaborations Workshop 2022 (CW22) is through the mini-workshops and demo sessions. This year there will be twelve 30- to 60-minute sessions related to the themes of CW22: Code Review, Ethics, Hybrid Working, and Software Sustainability. Here is an overview of just some of the sessions ahead!

Code Review

Researchers benefit greatly from small and regular code reviews during development, in addition to larger end-of-work reviews. Code review also plays a role in producing sustainable research software. However, establishing a culture of code review in research has been made difficult by a lack of guidance and awareness of its benefits. Furthermore, while good practices for code review have been established in the software industry, it is still unclear what processes and workflows work best for code review in a research setting. 

Members of the Code Review Community, an international and multi-sectoral group interested in advancing code review in research, will facilitate the session Code Review During Development, where they will present a guide on this topic designed for researchers, by researchers. The primary result of this work is a website describing processes that researchers can follow to integrate code review into their daily research routine. The guide introduces researchers to code review, provides practical advice on how to get started with it, and brings together existing resources for reference. Although the guidelines are built on existing research and the experience of Code Review Community members, it is a result of discussion within the community and has not been extensively tested in the field. The goal of the session is to get feedback and suggestions on the guidance and to develop understanding of code review within research more broadly. In particular, the facilitators seek to understand whether their guidelines are accessible to all, including under-represented groups in research.

Ethics

Researchers and research software developers have developed experience and expertise in their areas of work. They have spent time learning how to code, analyse data and are experts in their domains. As people become leaders in their field, whether it’s a small group or a large team, they also need to develop leadership and management skills, but often haven’t had the opportunity to learn them, or are self-taught. This lack of knowledge around team leadership negatively impacts the person in the leadership position as well as those in their team. Therefore there is the opportunity for short-format, practical, hands-on training for people in or transitioning to research leadership roles.

Tracy Teal and collaborators are developing a course on Inclusive Research Leadership modelled on the The Carpentries 2-day workshop format, which aims to provide participants with opportunities to learn about leadership, based on what we know works, and that values people - both the leader themselves and the people they lead. In Developing an Inclusive Research Leadership Training Curriculum, Tracy will introduce the key topics covered by this course and ask participants to give feedback on what they would like to see in the course. The structure of the workshop will be to answer and discuss structured questions in a group format as well as discuss and share question responses as pairs. We will also pitch a sprint to further develop the course as part of the Collaborations Workshop Hackday.

Hybrid Working

Mental health is important, but talking about it at work can be scary. It's difficult to know where to start, or what the response might be. After 2 years of a global pandemic our routines have been turned upside down, and the research software community is trying to adapt to hybrid working models that work wonderfully for some, but aren’t so great for others. 

In the session Good mental health, good research software, Dave Horsfall will open a conversation to talk about mental health freely, without judgement. He'll look at what mental health is, and investigate the common stressors for research software engineers. Participants will explore how our routines have changed and reflect on what impact this might have on our health and wellbeing. Finally, he'll introduce suggestions to improve support for mental health within our teams, with plenty of opportunities to provide feedback and opinions anonymously throughout the presentation. 

Software Sustainability

Writing automated tests for research software can sometimes feel like something that will slow you down. During Writing tests to save time, Alison Clarke will demonstrate how you can use tests as a tool to save you time as you write your code, as well as giving you greater confidence in the results. If you’ve never written a unit test before, or have tried in the past but given up, this demo aims to get you going and to use automated tests in a way that helps you and suits your project.

But wait, there’s more!

We’ll be running many other mini-workshops and demo sessions, and you can find them all on the CW22 agenda.

About Collaborations Workshop 2022

CW22 will take place online from Monday 4 - Thursday 7 April 2022 and registration is open via Eventbrite. To find out more information and see the agenda, please visit the CW22 website and sign up to receive CW22 updates here.