The Software Sustainability Institute / Distance Consultancy

A collaboration between The Software Sustainability Institute and the Distance project. For more information, please see the Institute's "who do we work with - Distance" page.

The outcomes of the collaboration are:

• User experience review: A report with recommendations as to how the user experience of Distance can be improved. The report is based upon a review of Distance's online resources and downloading and installing Distance. It consists of a number of documents:
  • Web site review: web site review and proposed changes.
  • Get in touch - example of a new "get in touch" page.
  • Help and support - example of a new "help and support" page
  • User experience review: review of experiences in downloading and running Distance for Windows 6.2 and Distance R packages.
• Developer experience review: A report with recommendations as to how the developer experience of Distance can be improved. The report is based upon a review of Distance's online resources, developer's manual, source code and test process, and experiences of setting up a local development/build/test environment for working on Distance's various components.
  • Developer experience review: review of resources and documentation from a developer's perspective.
  • Developer Experience Review - build and release: additional recommendations arising from exploring how to build a minor release of Distance for Windows.
• Governance policy: Guidelines on how to be a good Distance developer expressed as a code contribution policy and how GitHub issue trackers, and other processes can be used to help manage development.
  • Governance - issues and recommendations relating to governance that have arisen to date. This will be evolved over the next few weeks.
• Developer's guide: Guide on how to develop Distance for Windows and its components:
  • Distance Developers Guide
  • gh-pages branch

These outcomes are intended to help the Distance project to reduce the time between developing good theory, and published papers, and delivering usable code into the hands of biologists, conservationists and statisticians.

Deprecated:

• Architecture review: A report on Distance's architecture with proposed improvements to Distance's maintainability and extensibility and how to decouple its GUI. The report is based on a review of the Distance architecture and discussions with Distance developers and is intended to capture the knowledge of these developers. This includes how the Distance components are assembled into releases. The report is complemented with code examples, where applicable, as to how the recommendations can be implemented.
  • Aspects of this are covered in the developer's guide above.