MAUS in progress - Machine Automated Support for Software Management Plans

Like research data, research software plays a crucial role in the reproducibility of scientific results, and is therefore gaining growing recognition as a research output in itself.The development of research software (ranging from data-specific scripts to standalone software products) can be a major project that requires good planning and management. For example, the necessary infrastructure, such as software dependencies or hardware requirements, must be addressed, as well as the human resources needed to develop and maintain the software and write its documentation. Software Management Plans (SMPs) document all these requirements and thus improve software quality and reusability, in a similar way as Data Management Plans (DMPs) enhance research data. Furthermore, the structured information in SMPs is often useful in other contexts and stages of the software project and should be reusable, for example by being shareable with other tools, such as GitHub/GitLab. The Research Data Management Organiser (RDMO) is a well-established tool among the research community for creating DMPs and SMPs.In our project "Machine-AUtomated Support for Software Management Plans" (MAUS), we are developing plugins for RDMO that enhance the machine-readability and -actionability of SMPs.