Software Preservation Workshop

On 7th of July we participated in the highly successful Preserving Software Workshop organised by our fellow software engineers from the Software Sustainability Institute. This one day workshop was organised in the JISC London Office and had 28 participants from 19 UK academic and industrial institutions.

The participants were divided into four discussion groups, which during the day discussed four different topics on software preservation and sustainability and exchanged their findings after every session. The topics discussed were the following:

Software development for long-term reuse - What are prerequisites for long-term reuse of software? Some obvious answers are: clear licensing, clear documentation, common language, modular design, clear revision management, open and common standards, clear separation between data and code, records of technical and other properties.
Different approaches to software preservation - There are different approaches one could take to software preservation depending on its purpose: Preservation (techno-centric), Emulation (data-centric), Migration (functionality-centric), Transition (process-centric), Hibernation (knowledge-centric) and Procrastination (I’ll-get-round to it eventually-centric).
Arguing the case for software preservation - Why bother? There are five different purposes of software preservation: Achieve legal compliance, Create heritage value, Enable continued access to data, Encourage software reuse and Manage system and services. A great deal of discussion was to clearly identify the purpose in a particular scenario, then to identify the approach depending on timing and resources and discuss the benefits (personal, organisational and for society), how tangible those benefits are, and what problems one may be likely to encounter.
Delivering Software Preservation Guidance - How to help researchers (students, post docs etc.) learn about writing good and sustainable software? Some of the ideas discussed are: Tutorials, Software RAE/REF, Reproducible research, motivators such as working on important things, working in a supportive network of other researchers, advanced skill set and career advancement.

For more information about the workshop you can visit the SSI blog and look at the workshop slides on SlideShare.

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Recent notes

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SoundSoftware 2014: Videos now available!

The SoundSoftware 2014 workshop, our third annual workshop on software and data in audio and music research, was just as enjoyable as the previous two. Because so much research in this field ends up being expressed through software, a software workshop turns out to be all about the means by which research becomes useful and relevant to people other than the original researchers—fertile ground for interesting and thought-provoking talks.

The workshop videos are now available online at http://soundsoftware.ac.uk/soundsoftware2014, so if you weren't able to make it in person, catch up here!

Our third annual one-day workshop on Software and Data for Audio and Music Research takes place on the 8th of July 2014 at Queen Mary, University of London. The workshop includes talks on issues such as robust software development for audio and music research, reproducible research in general, management of research data, and open access. Read more here, clear your calendar, and register now!