Add Infra section

[rossfarrugia]

Add a new category of examples around Infrastructure considerations and examples for pharma companies adopting R. Example topics could be around package management, validation, or environment setup.

We could lift up efforts from areas such as R Validation Hub Regulatory Reporting Repo and showcase pharmaverse packages such as riskassessment, risk.assessr, connector and envsetup.

[rossfarrugia]

Alternative naming: Environment Management / SCE / GxP

Other topics: Containerisation, reproducibility, renv etc

[epijim]

We had a workshop on this topic earlier this year - slides are here: https://posit-conf-2025.github.io/reproducible-environments/

Themes I picked up:

Most companies currently want to 'offload' validation, but this causes it's own problems around cost and inability to have agility on what packages are available. Roche/Novartis are two companies that took the opposite route, with a target of fast turn around from validation request to release (Novartis aims for 3 days, Roche has done it faster).

There is a lot of overlap with above, but there are two general architectures present - the 'frozen' and 'rolling' validated R package cohorts.

A lot of alternatives present on how to solve caching - and also what tool to use to track the package list (e.g. renv, rv, etc)

Generally there is a problem I think around the R Validation Hub. Everyone thinks it's a great idea, but actually adopting it's tooling is quite limited (also connected to above- where most companies start by 'offloading' validation to a vendor, and only later start to prioritise cost and access to packages being fast).

[rossfarrugia]

Thanks @epijim - any interest from you or any of the workshop contributors to make a first draft of turning this into an examples article for our site?

The way I see it such an article could be an entry gateway into companies trying to take on the challenge and re-using existing open source tooling to help them.

[bms63]

Agree that this will be very useful.

Just a musing: I think a lot of folks using this site are interested in using R for TLFs, ADaMS, etc and then are also trying to advocate for R within their organization and faced with that validation question from management.

I know there are lots of resources scattered throughout different initiatives (R/Pharma, Phuse, Submission WG, etc) but having them consolidated here with lessons learned, ideas, etc I think could be really helpful for R Adoption with my mythical person's organization. :)