Best Practices
CIG welcomes contributions of modeling codes in geophysics that meet our software best practices. Software best practices aid your project in becoming discoverable and reusable. Best practices help you increase the impact of your work and get appropriate credit. By sharing your software, you make science more reproducible, and contribute to a growing software ecosystem. Additionally, following best practices allows you to direct more effort towards feature rich code while increasing your userbase. CIG provides support and resources for projects that have been accepted into the CIG software community.
Best practices for CIG codes are hosted in our Best Practices Github Repository and are specified at three different levels:
Practices that codes must follow in order to be accepted by CIG.
Practices in addition to the Minimum Best Practices that should be used by all codes developed within the CIG community. Codes not meeting all standards should be actively working to eliminate deficiencies.
Desirable practices that developers should consider in defining long-term development priorities for codes developed within the CIG community. These go beyond the “Standard Best Practices”, so they tend to be more important for long-term projects.
We maintain a Summary Table of the best practices.
We maintain a Template Repository that allows you see the best practices in action.
We maintain a Contributing Checklist that is meant as a guide to prepare your software for review by CIG.
Helpful Examples and Links
Example CIG projects that fulfill many of the best practices:
- https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect
- https://github.com/geodynamics/Rayleigh
- https://github.com/geodynamics/pylith
Some other useful checklists: