Quality is a fundamental aspect for a successful uptake of EOSC services and data repositories by the European research communities. EOSC Synergy is developing a quality based approach to foster the adoption of EOSC services and data repositories, which will improve, promote and reward quality. This approach exploits an automated validation process to assess the quality of the services and data repositories featuring continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. The pipelines are programmatically composed leveraging the Pipeline as Code implementation in Jenkins.
Software is a fundamental asset for a comprehensive analysis of the EOSC services. The software quality criteria to be verified through the quality pipelines is based on widely adopted best practices that have been collected and successfully applied in several European projects, and which are publicly available in “A set of Common Software Quality Assurance Baseline Criteria for Research Projects”. Correspondly, the data repositories quality criteria follows the FAIR data principles in accordance to the relevant European initiatives.
The level of adherence of the services and data repositories towards best practices and FAIR principles will be rewarded through verifiable, shareable and portable quality badges following the Open Badges specification. These badges will highlight the quality achievements of the software, making them. This approach will both promote adherence to quality and make the quality achievements more explicitly visible to the users, thus raising awareness and promoting quality code in research software. This approach will be facilitated as a service through the implementation of the so-called SQAaaS following the architecture showed in the figure.
In short, the EOSC Synergy project will contribute to the improvement and recognition of the quality attributes of both data and services in the EOSC, paving the path towards their long-term sustainability.
