Reproducible Software Environments

18 February 2026 - 09:30-12:30

Portobello Centre, Computer Room C28

RSE Team

All of our events may be recorded and shared via the University of Sheffield Kaltura platform so those who cannot attend may still benefit. We will consider your attendance implicit consent to this.

Ensuring that others are able to take your code, run it, and are able to produce the same (or equivalent) results is one of the key tenets of FAIR and reproducible research software. This course will provide you with an overview of different ways to make your code reproducible and then focus on virtual environments as a specific tool for computational reproducibility.

This event is for University of Sheffield researchers and research students only.

Prerequisite skills: Some experience with developing research software or scripts, for example in Python or R.

Learning Objectives

After completing this course, participants should be able to:

• Understand what computational reproducibility is, and why it is an issue for research.
• Describe the different levels of computational reproducibility.
• Understand the high-level nature and purpose of a virtual environment.
• Use venv along with pip to create and manage virtual environments.
• Understand the limitations of venv, and options to address them.

This course will be run in-person.

We are delighted to be able to make free at point of use training available to the research community, to enable better software and more open, reproducible research. However, free at point of use training is not free. The cost of a course can easily run to thousands of pounds, if preparation costs are taken into account.

If you sign up for a course, please make sure you either attend or cancel your booking. Bookings can usually be managed using myDevelopment or, failing that, by emailing rse@sheffield.ac.uk.

Running courses that are not fully attended wastes our funding (which is provided by taxpayers, charities and students, amongst others) and reduces our collective capacity to improve research outputs and researcher experiences.

Persistent failure to attend booked courses might result in you being excluded from future training opportunities.

More details and registration via myDevelopment.

Course material: https://fair2-for-research-software.github.io/FAIR4RS-VirtualEnvs/