At this week’s MCQLL meeting on February 22 at 3:00-4:00PM, Amanda Doucette will be giving a talk on Software Engineering Practices for Research Code. If you’d like to attend, please register for the Zoom meeting here if you haven’t already.
Abstract: Writing clean, readable, working code for research projects isn’t easy. Because clear requirements can’t be defined in advance, typical industry software engineering practices (Agile, Waterfall, etc.) can’t apply directly to writing research code. Furthermore, many academics don’t receive formal training in software engineering. In this talk, I’ll discuss how some software engineering principles can apply to writing better research code – including testing, reproducibility, and documentation. While this talk will be focused on the basics of writing better code, I strongly encourage more experienced programmers to attend as well and share your advice!