Modern software engineering has established sophisticated tools and workflows that enable distributed development of high-quality software. Here, we present our experiences in adopting these workflows to collectively develop, maintain, and use research software, specifically: a modeling framework for complex and evolving systems. We exemplify how sharing this modeling framework within our research group helped conveying software engineering best practices, fostered cooperation, and boosted synergies. Together, these experiences illustrate that the adoption of modern software engineering workflows is feasible in the dynamically changing academic context, and how these practices facilitate reliability, reproducibility, reusability, and sustainability of research software, ultimately improving the quality of the resulting scientific output.