useR! 2024

Over the past year, Roche/Genentech has been developing tools and infrastructure that facilitate our quality and validation exercises, a necessary part of using R in the regulated pharmaceutical industry. We’ve designed a process around broadly recognized package development best practices, where automated checks diligently assess packages. The process uses several tools that we have open-sourced over the past years. We want to share our approach, with particular emphasis on the core design philosophies we’ve set out to adhere to when building a cohort of packages applicable for usage when a certain level of trust is required. Beyond the process we have developed, we would like to present in detail the components we contributed to the R ecosystem. These are rd2markdown, a package designed to convert R package documentation into standard markdown files, and covtracer, which leverages our contributions to the well-known covr package to map any unit tests to the particular functions they evaluate. We believe various applications for these packages render them useful outside the strict quality assessment area and can play a significant role in day-to-day work with the R packages.