RSE community activities in Switzerland   >   CERN

CERN

 

This page serves as a landing point for a dedicated effort to champion research software code excellence at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics), specifically through our involvement in the European EVERSE project. Given the vast scale of the CERN computing ecosystem – spanning everything from large-scale distributed grid computing (WLCG) to individual analysis scripts – this page doesn’t represent the entire laboratory.

About EVERSE at CERN

EVERSE (European Virtual Institute for Research Software Excellence) is a Horizon Europe project, bringing together 19 universities and research institutes across 5 EOSC science clusters. Our mission is to build a collaborative framework for research software quality, helping to establish a cultural change where research software is recognized as a first-class citizen of the scientific process.

A small handful of RSEs at CERN are part of EVERSE, contributing across different work packages. Our focus within EVERSE is to act as a bridge – taking EVERSE community best practices and software quality tooling and sharing those resources with the broader Swiss and European RSE communities.

What We Offer to the RSE Community

Whether you are working at CERN or another Swiss institution, the tools and frameworks we are developing and piloting through EVERSE can help you evaluate, measure, and improve your code quality.

Here is what we are actively bringing to the RSE toolkit:

  • The Research Software Quality Toolkit (RSQkit): A curated knowledge base of best practices, guidelines, and community-vetted criteria tailored for scientific code.
  • Automated Quality Pipelines (resqui): Continuous Integration (CI/CD) pipelines designed to evaluate repositories against configurable quality indicators. It generates standardized JSON quality metrics that can optionally integrate into the DashVERSE analytics dashboard.
  • Tool Catalogue (TechRadar): A community-curated catalogue of external tools and services to help developers discover the right solutions for issues identified during software assessment.
  • Training Catalogue (EVERSE Training Catalogue): A one-stop shop for trainees to discover training materials and events from the community about Research Software Engineering. A central place for trainers to disseminate their resources and be featured in a list of contact.
  • Credit and Recognition Framework: We are working on embedding platforms like APICURON and BIP! Scholar to ensure that contributions to research in general are visibly credited (e.g., training, curation, maintenance, etc.), helping RSEs showcase their scholarly impact beyond traditional papers.

Check out the slides presented during an online RSE Switzerland event.

Get Involved & Contact

If you are a researcher who codes, a full-time RSE, or simply interested in software quality frameworks, we would love to connect. You can help us adopt and test these tools in your own projects, or contribute to our quality metrics.