Context / Research Domain

Planning for continuation of dissemination of research outputs is an established part of a research grant application. We frequently see requests for ongoing costs for website hosting, placement of datasets in repositories or hosting of developed code in an online version control system. However, it is less frequent that considerations are made of ongoing technical staff attention to support staff responsible for code sustainability, maintanence, or data updates. Code “end of project plans”, which detail what attention has been paid to issues around what happens to support developed research software at the end of a PhD project or research grant will help to assure those other users of the software of its ongoing sustainability, can be a crucial part of this support. Avoiding the curse of “PhD-ware” assures PIs within a research group that future work of the group can successfully build on a substantial investment of intellectual effort.

For this session we propose development of a project to assure software sustainability when that software comes from a short fixed-term project.

Problem

Two main situations can arise: either the software is not maintained and virtually “left to die out”, or the original developer keeps maintaining it at the new institution, keeping them away from new duties. In the latter scenario we can still encounter problems tracking down and contacting the developer. Well documented and annotated code is only part of the solution, especially when we consider sizable projects. Currently there is no widely accepted agreement nor policy about whom the responsibility of code maintenance lies with.

Even when there’s a maintenance plan for funding and grants, this generally includes technical costs (e.g. hosting, domain and SSL certificate purchases), but not the time/people needed.

Solution

A short (~5 minutes) questionnaire that leads to a badge for your README indicating your maintenance/end-of-life plans. This should be a minimal amount of work to encourage people to consider maintenance without becoming overwhelmed by the options

Questions include:

How much maintenance do you want to do? None/a tiny bit/a lot/etc.
Do you have funding for maintenance?
Have you identified funding opportunities for further maintenance?
How long do you intend to maintain for?
Will you continue maintenance after funding runs out?
Who is the contact person at the end of the project?
Do you expect to ever come back to this project for further development? I.e. is this a development gap, not end-of-life
Do you welcome new development from other people? Are you able to answer questions/open to being contacted?
Do you support/help track forks for new development?

Diagrams / Illustrations

Licence

These materials (unless otherwise specified) are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence. Please see the human-readable summary of the CC BY 4.0 and the full legal text for further information.

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