Could you provide some insight into the techniques that you use to ensure the quality of your solutions. For example, sometimes, I like to test my result using stopifnot()
to ensure I'm not receiving ridiculous results. Are there any other techniques or functions that you use in data processing to ensure that you're receiving the solution you meant to?
Note: I realize that this is a broad question and perhaps a candidate for community wiki or even closure, but rather than voting to close, perhaps assist me by adding comments to direct the conversation.
Just a few things that come to mind (in random order)
This page has very interesting link for debugging in R (ok this is during production, but still related to your issue I think)
You can use exceptions, as explained in this discussions (and links therein)
You can write tests with known results (both for success and failure) and see that they actually do what they are supposed to do. Be sure to pass some weird data to the functions and see how they behave in a "not-so-normal" situation.
Don't just rely on automated tests: give your functions to a fairly computer illiterate person at work (not enough that he/she can't use R though!) and let him/her do some beta tests. You'll be amazed at the quantity of errors he/she will come up with!!! :)
Quality in software engineering is quite a massive area, and most of it applies to code written in R as much as code written in Cobol or C#, so my first answer would be 'it depends'.
For me, I come from the Pharmaceutical Industry, where what we do is regulated by government agencies like the FDA and the MHRA. For us, Quality is something we think about throughout the process so I would list the following as visible artifacts of quality;
However, that's a big list, and I imagine their are lots of industries that don't do all of them (finance, education) and probably some who do more (building nuclear reactors, saving lives, NASA).
More specifically to what i assume you're getting at, before you code you should be able to define some specific starting input's and the answers you should get out, and I recommend you use something like RUnit or Testthat to build these in.
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