Guidebook to doing research software engineering in a team-setting
A living document for how we work and build things in the Seedcase project
Luke W. Johnston 
Signe Kirk Brødbæk
Kristiane Beicher
Marton Vago
This guidebook is written following the diátaxis “how-to guide” style. And because this document reflects how we work in the Seedcase Project, it is living and constantly evolving. It won’t ever be in a state of “done”.
Welcome!
These documents are very much a work in progress and very much incomplete. We work on it slowly and when we can.
This guidebook walks you through how we, in the Seedcase Project, develop and release research software, build data infrastructures, create content on websites, and work together as a team. We’ve written this to collect best practices and lessons learned as we’ve built products as a team.
We cover topics that range from our contribution workflow, how we write code, how we ensure our products are secure and reliable, how we collaborate and manage our work, and more.
Who you are as the reader
We’ve written these documents considering a few people in mind who we think will read the documents:
- New contributors/team members: This is who we are primarily writing for. If you are new to working with us on the Seedcase Project, these documents are designed with you in mind.
- Research software/data engineers: If you work in another organization or group, we write these documents to share our practices with you. You can use this either as a guide or as a reference to help you improve and learn how we work.
- Managers or leaders: If you are in a position where you have control or power to influence how work is done and organised, these documents can serve as inspiration for how to structure teams, workflows, and practices to build products more effectively, reliably, and securely.
- Research or development operations personnel: For those who are responsible for maintaining infrastructure or operational aspects of a research organisation, these documents can provide insights into best practices for managing and deploying research software and data systems in an effective way that hopefully reduces your workload.
Contributing
Check out our contributing document for information on how to contribute to the project.
Contributors
The following people have contributed to this project by submitting pull requests 🎉
Changes
Check out our changelog for information on what has changed in each version of the guidebook.