Good Software Engineering Practice for R Packages

Welcome to the homepage of the workshop “Good Software Engineering Practice for R Packages”. In this 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 exercises. Participants need already to be comfortable with writing functions in R, and use their own laptops.

Next Event

The next event will be held on September 26, 2023 as an in-person workshop at the George Washington University, Biostatistics Center, Suite 750, Rockville, MD, US. Please register here.

This event is organized by openstatsware as well as the ASA. We are grateful to have received logistic support by ASA BIOP and ASA. The venue is kindly provided by the George Washington University Biostatistics Center. Presenters will be Andrew Bean, Biju (Ryan) Wang and Daniel Sabanes Bove.

Communication

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

Workshop Program

09:00 - 09:30 Introduction and outline
09:30 - 10:30 R Package Syntax
10:30 - 10:45 Coffee Break
10:45 - 11:45 Software Engineering Workflow
11:45 - 12:45 Lunch Break
12:45 - 13:45 Package Quality
13:45 - 14:45 Collaboration via GitHub
14:45 - 15:00 Afternoon Break
15:00 - 15:45 Publication of R Packages
15:45 - 16:45 Shiny Development
16:45 - 17:00 Summary

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 use their own laptop to be able to participate in the exercises. Light breakfast and coffee, as well as lunch, will be provided.

Optional reading list

Past Events