10 quick tips for making your software outlive your job
Abstract
Loss of key personnel has always been a risk for research software projects. Key members of the team may have to step away due to illness or burnout, to care for a family member, from a loss of financial support, or because their career is going in a new direction. Today, though, political and financial changes are putting large numbers of researchers out of work simultaneously, potentially leaving large amounts of research software abandoned. This article presents ten tips to help researchers ensure that the software they have built will continue to be usable after they have left their present job -- whether in the course of voluntary career moves or researcher mobility, but particularly in cases of involuntary departure due to political or institutional changes.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2505.06484,
title = {10 quick tips for making your software outlive your job},
author = {Richard Littauer and Greg Wilson and Jan Ainali and Eman Abdullah AlOmar and Sylwester Arabas and Yanina Bellini Saibene and Kris Bubendorfer and Kaylea Champion and Clare Dillon and Jouni Helske and Pieter Huybrechts and Daniel S. Katz and Chang Liao and David Lippert and Fang Liu and Pierre Marshall and Daniel R. McCloy and Ian McInerney and Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer and Priyanka Ojha and Christoph Treude and Ethan P. White},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.06484},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
14 pages; 1 figure. New version uploaded to remove inaccurate, most likely hallucinated (!) refs in Rule 7, which we did not catch or suspect on previous submission