Status Update: CRAN Release of `riskmetric`

By Juliane Manitz, Yilong Zhang and Doug Kelkhoff | April 2, 2021

We have reached a major milestone. The R package riskmetric has been released and is now available on CRAN.

What is riskmetric?

riskmetric is a collection of risk metrics to evaluate the quality of R packages following the framework suggested by the R validation hub (see our white paper for details). Various quality metrics are provided which evaluate best practices of software development, code documentation, community engagement and development sustainability. This package serves as a starting point for exploring the heterogeneity of code quality, and begin a broader conversation about the validation of R packages.

How to use it?

We separate three steps in the workflow to assess the risk of an R package using riskmetric:

  1. Finding a source for package information (installed package or CRAN/git source) pkg_ref()
  2. Assessing the package under validation criteria pkg_assess()
  3. Scoring assessment criteria pkg_score()

The results will be assembled in a dataset of validation criteria containing an overall risk score for each package

A detailed demo can be found in this blogpost from last year.

What comes next?

The development of riskmetric continues and it is a community project. Comfort with a quantification of risk comes via consensus, and for that this project is dependent on close community engagement. There are plenty of ways to help:

  • Share the package
  • File issues when you encounter bugs
  • Weigh in on proposed metrics, or suggest a new one
  • Help us devise the best way to summarize risk into a single score
  • Help us keep documentation up to date
  • Contribute code to tackle the metric backlog

If you are interested in getting involved in contributing to our technical efforts then please send an email to psi.aims.r.validation@gmail.com. Or join our mailing list to receive an invite to our quarterly meeting and receive notifications of new blog posts.