Title: Package development: The why, long-term maintenance and community building.

Abstract: Rebecca will reflect on their last 10+ years of package development.  Why their first package was developed, why they continue to develop packages and what they think others might consider when embarking on package development. The challenges with long-term package maintenance in a world with changing priorities will be highlighted.  The importance for everyone to seek community building rather than competing will be stressed in the context of the ever-expanding and evolving software landscape.

Bio: Rebecca Killick is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Statistics at Lancaster University, UK. Their research is in solving real-world problems for data whose statistical properties vary over time, by developing statistical methodology for changepoint detection (abrupt changes) and locally stationary (slowly varying) modelling. Killick has authored 4 CRAN packages and their changepoint package is used in over 70 different companies around the world, has been translated into other programming languages and cited more than 1,000 times. Killick is co-Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Statistical Software and a member of the rOpenSci Statistical Software Peer Review advisory committee.