Good Software Engineering Practice for R Packages

Welcome to the homepage of the workshop “Good Software Engineering Practice for R Packages”. In this course participants will learn hands-on skills and tools to engineer reliable R packages used in biostatistics. The day will be a mix of presentations and exercises. Participants need to be comfortable with writing functions in R and use their own laptops.

Up-coming Event

The next event will be on-site, at the Radisson Collection Hotel, Yangtze Shanghai, on July 31st, 2025.

Please note that all the content will be in English, delivered in English and Chinese. This event is sponsored/organized by PharmaSUG and advertised also through the R User Group (RUG) China. Presenters will be Shuang Li, Zhenglin Ruan, Chunyan Wu and Joe Zhu.

Workshop Program

This is the program for 31st July 2025, all times in China Standard Time (GMT+8):

9:30 - 9:40 Introduction and outline
9:40 - 10:10 R Package Syntax
10:10 - 10:50 Software Engineering Workflow
10:50 - 11:10 Tea Break
11:10 - 11:40 Package Quality
11:40 - 12:10 Collaboration via GitHub
12:10 - 12:30 Summary and Discussion

Prerequisites & Technical Setup

Prior to the course, participants should

  • set up a (free) GitHub.com account. 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.
  • download and extract simulatr.zip
  • either make sure they have a working R software development setup on their own laptop (up-to-date git/Rtools/R/RStudio) or get access to https://posit.cloud. The latter offers a free tier account with 25 hours of computing time per months and can be accessed using ones GitHub.com account.
  • in your rstudio terminal, set the ssh key by ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your_email@example.com", then use command cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to show your public key, and copy and paste it to https://github.com/settings/keys, with the name “pharmasug-2025-key”.

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

Optional reading list

Past Events

  • 1st August 2024, Beijing
  • 24th March 2023, Shanghai
  • 10th February 2023, Basel