Good Software Engineering Practice for R Packages

Welcome to the homepage of the workshop “Good Software Engineering Practice for R Packages”. In this face-to-face course participants will learn hands-on skills and tools to engineer reliable R packages used in biostatistics. The day will be a mix of presentations and team exercises to build a small R package. Participants need to be comfortable with writing functions in R and bring their own laptops.

Next Event

The next event will be held on 10 February 2023 jointly with the BBS as face-to-face meeting in Basel. Registration is closed but there is a waiting list.

Communication

We offer a gitter chat channel to communicate before, during, and after the course.

Workshop Program

09:00 - 09:45 Introduction and outline
09:45 - 10:45 R packages, what are they? + practical
10:45 - 12:00 Workflow for creating R packages + practical
12:00 - 13:00 Lunch break, chat & network
13:00 - 14:00 Package quality + exercise
14:00 - 15:30 Collaboration with git & GitHub + group practical
15:30 - 16:00 Coffee break, chat & network
16:00 - 17:00 Publication + practical
17:00 - 17:45 Buffer, recap + wrap-up
18:30 - 20:30 Optional dinner

Prerequisites & Technical Setup

Prior to the course, participants should

  • set up a (free) GitHub.com account. There are other git Platforms like Gitlab or Bitbucket but we made the choice to go with GitHub.com for the course since it is by far the most relevant git platform in the R community.
  • download and extract simulatr.zip
  • either make sure they have a working R software development setup on their own laptop (up-to-date git/Rtools/R/RStudio) or get access to https://posit.cloud. The latter offers a free tier account with 25 hours of computing time per months and can be accessed using ones GitHub.com account.

For the course, participants are required to bring their own laptop to be able to participate in the exercises.

Optional reading list