Good Software Engineering Practice for R Packages

Welcome to the homepage of the short course “Good Software Engineering Practice for R Packages”, a pre-conference course for the 46th Annual Conference of the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics (ISCB). In this course you will learn hands-on skills and tools to engineer reliable R packages used in statistics. The short course will be conducted in a full day and will be a mix of presentations and exercises. Participants need to be comfortable with writing functions in R and use their own laptops as a prerequisite.

Event Details

The event will be held on Sunday, 24th of August 2025 as an in-person workshop at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, in room Biozentrum U1.101. Please refer to the conference agenda for more details.

The instructors for this workshop will be Audrey T. Yeo, Alessandro Gasparini and Daniel Sabanés Bové. You can learn more about them in the introduction section.

Workshop Program

9.00 - 9.15 Introduction and outline
9.15 - 10.00 R package syntax
10.00 - 10.30 Exercise
10.30 - 11.00 Coffee break
11.00 - 11.45 Package quality
11.45 - 12.30 Exercise
12.30 - 13.30 Lunch break
13.30 - 14.15 Collaboration via GitHub
14.15 - 15.00 Exercise
15.00 - 15.30 Coffee break
15.30 - 16.15 Publication of R packages
16.15 - 16.45 Exercise
16.45 - 17.00 Summary and Q&A

Prerequisites & Technical Setup

Prior to the short course, participants should

  • Set up a (free) GitHub.com account.
    • Note: There are other git platforms like Gitlab or Bitbucket, but we made the choice to go with GitHub.com for the course, since it is by far the most relevant git platform in the R community.
  • Install the latest R and RStudio software.
  • Install Rtools (on Windows) or the required tools (on macOS) to compile/build packages from source code.
  • Install additional R packages using the installation script.

For the course, participants are required to use their own laptop to be able to participate in the exercises.

Optional Reading List

Material from Past Events