Metrics for assessing adoption of good development practices are a useful way to ensure that software is sustainable, reusable and functional. Sustainability means that the software used today will be available - and continue to be improved and supported - in the future. We report here an initial set of metrics that measure good practices in software development. This initiative differs from previously developed efforts in being a community-driven grassroots approach where experts from different organisations propose good software practices that have reasonable potential to be adopted by the communities they represent. We not only focus our efforts on understanding and prioritising good practices, we assess their feasibility for implementation and publish them here.

CEITEC Masaryk University Brno 625 00 Czech Republic

Department of Plant Systems Biology VIB Ghent 9052 Belgium

DTL PO Box 19245 Utrecht 3501 DE Netherlands

ELIXIR Hub Wellcome Trust Genome Campus Hinxton CB10 1SD UK

EMBL EBI Wellcome Trust Genome Campus Hinxton CB10 1SD UK

Institute for Biostatistics and Medical Informatics Faculty of Medicine University of Ljubljana Ljubljana SI 1104 Slovenia

Loschmidt Laboratories Faculty of Science Masaryk University Brno 625 00 Czech Republic

Software Sustainability Institute University of Edinburgh Edinburgh EH9 3FD UK

Systems Bioinformatics Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Amsterdam 1081 HV Netherlands

The Earlham Institute and ELIXIR UK Norwich Research Park Norwich NR4 7UH UK

University La Sapienza Rome 00185 Italy

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Four simple recommendations to encourage best practices in research software