Welcome to the ELIXIR SMP

What is a Software Management Plan?

A Software Management Plan (SMP) describes the management life cycle for software that is designed, implemented, and/or maintained within a particular project. The goal of an SMP is to ensure that the software remains accessible and reusable both in the short and long term.

Why Use a Software Management Plan?

Similar to a Data Management Plan, an SMP formalizes a set of structures and goals to support various aspects of software development. These include:

• Reproducibility and Reusability: Ensuring your software can be reproduced and reused by others.
• Funding and Milestones: Helping funding agencies understand your development process and track milestones.
• Community Standards: Raising awareness of existing standards in the software community.
• Accessibility: Making sure your software can be accessed and used by the broader community.

What is the ELIXIR SMP?

ELIXIR has developed a low-barrier SMP, specifically tailored for life science researchers, aligned to the FAIR Research Software principles. Starting from the Four Recommendations for Open Source Software, the ELIXIR SMP was iteratively refined by surveying the practices of the community and incorporating the received feedback. The result was a collection of questions that capture certain attributes about a piece of research software. You can find out more about context, questions and structure of the ELIXIR SMP in the content tab.

How to do a ELIXIR SMP?

You can create an ELIXIR SMP using the Software Management Wizard, where you will be guided to fill in the questions that compose the ELIXIR SMP.

How was the ELIXIR SMP developed?

Data Management Plans (DMPs) are a cornerstone of good data management and are now considered a key element of Open Science practices. A DMP describes the data management life cycle for the data to be collected, processed and/or generated within the lifetime of a particular project or activity. Conversely, a Software Management Plan (SMP) can help formalise a set of structures and goals that ensure the software is accessible and reusable in the short, medium and long term. Although it has a management perspective, the main advantage of an SMP is that it provides clear context to the software that is being developed. In that sense, it addresses several aspects of the software development process such as (a) supporting reproducibility and reusability of the software, (b) allowing funding agencies to have a better grasp of the envisioned development process (as well as the achieved milestones), (c) increasing the awareness of the existing community standards that can/should be used, and (d) ensuring that the software can be easily accessed by the wider community.

There are a few flavours of SMPs already available in one form or another. The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) offers a very detailed checklist that is further complemented by an online sustainability evaluation service (SES). Several journals (such as SoftwareX and the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)) have checklists that are expected to be filled in by the software authors before any submissions addressing most of the key points of an SMP. Finally, there are funding agencies (such as the Wellcome Trust) that expect a plan for the management of research output, including software, in submitted applications.

A key downside of the aforementioned SMPs is that they tend to be rather complex, occasionally requiring deep technical knowledge of the software development process. In order to address these drawbacks, ELIXIR has designed a simplified version of an SMP, tailored for Life Science oriented projects but still general enough so as to be widely used. The primary goal of the ELIXIR SMP is to encourage wider adoption by Life Science researchers, and be as inclusive as possible to the various levels of technical expertise, while also having an explicit connection to the FAIR principles for Research Software. A common theme in Life Science researchers is the wide differences in background expertise, with the vast majority of researchers being self-taught research software developers. Having an SMP with a relatively low barrier in technical knowledge, while maintaining all the best practices expected in research software development, may both encourage wider adoption of these practices as well as increase the awareness of the multiple aspects involved in research software development.

The overall process that led to the creation of the ELIXIR Software Management Plan can be found in the ELIXIR Software Management Plan for the Life Sciences BioHackrxiv preprint.