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Software Management Plan (SMP)

A Software Management Plan (SMP) is a structured document which defines a plan describing what you will develop, for whom the software is intended, how it will be delivered, and how it will be supported over time. The plan addresses management during the active phases of development and sustainability once the project is completed. The purpose of an SMP is to prepare in advance of, and document during, the development information that will be needed for the final stages of the research project.

An SMP typically includes the following contents:

  • Assets Used and Produced
  • Software Documentation and Version Control Protocol
  • Preservation and Sustainability
  • Roles and Responsibilities
  • Software Dissemination and Sharing
  • Ethics, Licensing and Legal Compliance

Hyper Articles en Ligne (HAL) provides a basic research software management plan template which you may follow. The Netherlands eScience Center and the Dutch Research Council have also taken the initiative to develop a practical guidelines for software management plans.

Utilizing a software management plan is highly recommended to ensure the desired level of reproducibility in your project. Achieving absolute reproducibility is challenging given the growing complexity of statistical and computational techniques, such as multi-threading and pseudo-randomness. However, by clearly defining reproducibility goals and implementing a comprehensive SMP, you can employ targeted best practices to reduce uncertainty and enhance research reproducibility.

Why you may need a Software Management Plan?

Here are several benefits to having a well-documented plan to manage and share your research software as the Software Sustainability Institute points out:

  • Better understanding of roles and responsibilities in the project and potentially minimize the organizational and logistical damage if members of the project team change.
  • Reduce the efforts for other researchers to make use of, reuse and cite the research software.
  • More research funders are planning or requiring software management to be addressed as part of the mandatory research data management plan.

Reproducibility Goal

Many best practices can be applied to software project management, but the practicalities of implementing these practices vary across different project scenarios. Defining the reproducibility your project wants to achieve by categorical levels simplifies targeting best practices and resources to meet the specific needs of each level.

This article about different levels of reproducibility in research software, How reproducible should research software be?, introduces four levels of research software reproducibiltiy. These levels can be used to identify how reproducible the software should be and the best practices to achieve these different levels of reproducibility.

  • Level 0 - The script you downloaded that one time from the internet

    Share code snippets, functions and single operations from the internet. Simple code that is intended for single or occasional use.

  • Level 1 - Research software for publication

    Code that directly support the research conclusion, for example data processing, analysis and visualization scripts specific to the project or data.

  • Level 2 - Research software as a tool

    Code that is intended to be applied to different inputs or scenarios over a modest period of time, for example scientific software packages and development frameworks.

  • Level 3 - Research software as infrastructure

    Software that is used by a broad community for more general purposes, for example data archiving systems and laboratory information management systems.

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