Guidelines and Environment to Support Sustainable Software Development at DLR

Abstract

Research software is often developed by scientists who are domain experts. Most of them have no specific education in software development. At the German Aerospace Center (DLR), we started an initiative for better research software to help scientists developing and sustaining their software. The central elements of the initiative are practical software development guidelines and the establishment of a supportive environment. The guidelines describe the desired development practice. The environment is established with this practice in mind and consists of offers such as central tools, training, and opportunities for knowledge exchange. Both elements are further developed by a joint community at DLR. In this talk, we briefly introduce the guidelines and the environment for research software developers at DLR. Particularly, we focus on the minimum practice imposed by the guidelines and show the interplay between guidelines and environment. Concretely, we present the concept of our new training. It connects the minimum practice with the usage of our GitLab-based software development collaboration platform on the basis of hands-on exercises. Finally, we share our experience with the training which has been taken by about 100 participants so far.