The openCARP CDE: Concept for and implementation of a sustainable collaborativedevelopment environment for research software

Abstract

This work describes the setup of an advanced technical infrastructure for collabora-tive software development in large, distributed projects based on GitLab. We presentits customization and extension, additional features and processes like code review,continuous automated testing, DevOps practices, and sustainable life-cycle manage-ment including long-term preservation and citable publishing of software releasesalong with relevant metadata. The collaborative development environment (CDE) iscurrently used for developing the open cardiac simulation software openCARP and anevaluation showcases its capability and utility for collaboration and coordination ofsizeable heterogeneous teams. As such, it could be a suitable and sustainable infras-tructure solution for a wide range of research software projects.