Designing The Turing Way Guide to Project Design

Demo session title: Good Practices for Designing Software Development Projects (The Turing Way)

Effective methods for project design are crucial to the success of a research project. Particularly in software development, design principles can lead to better code, maintainability, and extendability. Project design encompasses a variety of aspects, starting from defining the purpose, main research questions, expected users and target audience, available resources and skills required in the project. It is also important to explore the possible outcomes, plans to address expected challenges, ensure diversity of stakeholders and reduce possible barriers to participation.

The Turing Way is an open-source, community-led book project that aims to bring together diverse contributors and collaborators to share resources and practices that make data science reproducible, ethical and inclusive. The project is developed and maintained on an online project repository (https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way) and invites contributions to its 5 guides, including the Guide for Project Design.

In this session, we will introduce the Guide for Project Design to discuss good practices for designing software-related research projects, including how to use open-source tools and resources for meeting project goals and apply agile methods for project management. We will demonstrate The Turing Way guides to prompt discussions on developing inclusive engagement pathways and setting software projects that are open for contributions from people with diverse skills. Through this discussion, we will gather suggestions on chapters that The Turing Way community can develop in the Guide for Project Design.

Mini-workshop or demo session description

Aim: We aim to facilitate a mini-workshop session that discusses good practices, recommendations and guidance for designing research projects. Especially, we will provide examples of software development projects to help our participants understand the relevance and use of project design practices in their work.

Outcome:

• Session attendees who are new to software development will have the opportunity to learn about project design practices in research projects. Particularly, we will talk about agile development, project management and software sustainability methods.
• Though we will particularly show them examples from open source projects, we will also invite participants thoughts and ideas for managing such design aspects for projects dealing with closed access or sensitive data.
• Experienced members are also welcome to attend and help pass their knowledge on to others.

Connection with the theme:

This session will provide an opportunity to discuss project design and invite CW21 attendees to apply them in their software development work. The session lead will cover both, the technical methods and human-centred design principles, to create a welcoming and inclusive research project, and ensuring the long-term sustainability of the software - aspects that are perfectly aligned with the CW21 theme.