Assessment of Research Software Quality

As any product, software components may differ in their characteristics that overall may refer as a software quality. Although the number of quality characteristics or metrics may be extensively large, their weight in the overall perceived quality is different. Many of the metrics are quite similar and may be grouped in a few groups related to the software development process. “ISO/IEC 9126-1:2001 Software engineering - Product quality document” defines usability, sustainability and maintainability as a main software quality parameters. OpenEBench provides a model for more than 50 metrics to assess bioinformatics tools quality.

FAIR principles for research Software

Data-driven research is not only limited and determined by the findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of data. Following the success of the FAIR Guiding Principles, several efforts have been made to apply them to sofware (Towards FAIR principles for research software, FAIR4RS WG) and other artifacts constitutive of research, such as workflows. The Tools Observatory approaches software quality in line with these developments.

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