About this project documentation

Our project is funded as part of the call "Research Software Sustainability" by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

The call description read

The objective of this call for proposals is the building and testing of infrastructures in order to make research software available and provide it in a sustainable manner to a larger audience. As best-practice examples, projects should have a positive impact on research-software development and on infrastructure facilities.

To fulfill this requirement, we will establish a minimal infrastructure for the sustainable development and provision of research software, cf. also the original project proposal.

Not only will the resulting software, Hexatomic, have to be sustainable, the infrastructure that is used to develop and provide it will need to as well.

One of the explicit aims of the call is to provide "best practice examples" for future projects. In order to make the extraction of best practices from our project possible, it is necessary to document not only the actual software and infrastructure, but also the processes through which decisions have been arrived at in the course of the project. This concerns all levels of decisions, including software engineering decisions, infrastructural components, architectural decisions, workflow decisions, tooling decisions, etc.

The right place to document processes and decisions is the documentation of the project itself which is provided here. Among other things, the project documentation will therefore serve as a decision log.

The project documentation is a "living document", i.e., it is constantly added to and changed, and may change in its structure. It does not refer to a specific version of Hexatomic, and is not versioned like the user, developer and maintainer documentation for the software. Instead, it is a place where the practices of our project are iteratively developed as a base for discussion and extraction of good practices in sustainable research software development.