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What is SQAaaS?

SQAaaS has been created with the intention of bringing over novel quality practices when it comes to developing software in research environments.

The SQAaaS platform is developed by CSIC, LIP and UPV.

Why care about quality in research software?#

It often happens that research software is not produced in accordance with some minimal quality conventions, making it difficult to be adopted, reused or sustained in the long term.

This appears as a key structural issue since the research work has to be subject to continual revision and refinement, as the only form to achieve steady innovation.

Following the Open Science path#

The present and future of science, the Open Science paradigm, promotes not only the values of openness and accessibility, but in the specific case of software, also those aligned with the Software Quality Assurance (SQA) processes. Regardless of their expertise, the SQAaaS platform aids researchers to meet the good SQA practices when writing code, and it does it through the adherence to the DevOps culture, and in particular, through the concept of CI/CD pipelines.

Fostering quality in research software#

The SQAaaS portal offers access to two different features, each one with its own purpose and audience:

  • The Pipeline as a Service module provides the end user with a graphical means to compose the CI/CD pipelines that will verify and validate (V&V) her software. To facilitate the task, each stage in the pipeline executes a unit of work that is contextualized in a specific SQA criterion. The SQAaaS supports SQA criteria both for software and services standards.
    • Common audience: computational scientists, research software engineers (RSEs) and/or any developer code for tackling
  • The Quality Assessment and Awarding (QAA) module performs a comprehensive SQA analysis in accordance with the criteria from the aforementioned standards for software and services. As a result, this module provides not only a report summarizing the results of the assessment and pointers to improve, but in case that a minimum set of criteria have been met, the QAA returns a digital badge (provided by Badgr) showcasing the achievements being accomplished by the software.
    • Common audience: any stakeholder within the research ecosystem, from researchers (individuals, communities) to policy makers or funding organisations.