Best practices for validating research software prototypes - MARKOS case study

A common approach in research projects is to plan the evaluation and in particular the validation phase In the last months of the project. When done late in the project, validation cannot provide valuable inputs to the development of the research idea, because there is no space to bring about changes, and very often ends up as confirmatory tests. Software validation can and should occur since creating the first lines of code until the completion of the system in test. Thus, we propose the approach where research project can adopt the agile paradigm used by startups “release early, release often”, not only to development, but also to validation: “validate early, validate often”, to improve the quality of projects results on one hand and to be in line with potential users on the other.