Tools and services for research software quality

Abstract

One of the objectives of the EU-funded EVERSE [eve26] project is to create a quality framework for research software and code excellence within the research communities. Within this, our goal is to leverage existing resources and build services on top of them to assess the quality dimensions, such as FAIRness, Maintainability, Sustainability and to link these assessments to research community best practices that support the improvement of software quality. To this end, we collected metrics commonly used by research communities and created the Research Software quality indicators catalog [ind26]. These are implemented through a list of tools, that assess different research software quality dimensions, by checking for indicators - like the software having a license, a unique persistent identifier, descriptive metadata, etc. In this article, we present three components, the Technology Radar (TechRadar) [VDG+ 26], the Quality Pipeline (resqui) [GE26] and the EVERSE Dashboard (DashVERSE) [DE26], which together will take the Research Software Engineer (RSE) through the journey of assessing and improving the quality of their software. These tools complement the [Research Software Quality Toolkit RSQKit [rsq26a], a knowledge base developed by the EVERSE community, designed to inform researchers and RSEs about good practices in research software engineering. 1. The TechRadar is a curated, interactive catalogue of external tools and services designed to facilitate software improvement. Organized by quality dimensions (e.g., FAIRness), the TechRadar empowers users to discover and select the most appropriate solutions to address the specific issues identified in the assessment phase, thus closing the loop from analysis to action. 2. The Quality Pipeline resqui is a flexible to reuses existing tools that automatically assesses a software repository against a configurable set of quality indicators. Available as both a command-line interface for local analysis and a GitHub Action for seamless integration into CI/CD workflows, resqui generates a detailed, machine-readable report of the software’s current quality status. 3. The DashVERSE is a visual analytics platform that ingests and displays the results from the resqui. This dashboard provides an intuitive interface to interpret assessment outcomes, identify specific quality deficits, and track the evolution of their software’s quality over time.