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 to be comfortable with writing functions in R and use their own laptops.

Next Event

The next event will be online, live streamed from Roche Shanghai, so perfect for attendees from Asia! Please mark the Friday 24th March 2023 and register here:

Please note that all the content will be in English. Workshop invitations and preparation details for the practice will be sent out in emails. This event is sponsored/organized by Roche PD China Data Sciences and advertised also through the R User Group (RUG) China. Presenters will be Daniel Sabanes Bove, Liming Li, Shuang Li and Joe Zhu.

We are looking forward to many online participants!

Communication

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

Workshop Program

This is the program for 24th March 2023, all times in China Standard Time (GMT+8):

09:00 - 09:30 Introduction and outline
09:30 - 10:30 R Package Syntax
10:30 - 10:45 Tea 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 Tea Break
15:00 - 15:45 Publication of R Packages
15:45 - 16:30 Shiny Development
16:30 - 17:00 Summary and Discussion

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.

Optional reading list

Past Events

  • 10th February 2023, Basel