At this week’s lab meeting, Amanda Doucette will give a talk titled ‘Software Engineering Practices for Research Code.’

  • Tuesday, February 22, 15:00–16:00 (Montréal time, UTC-5).
  • Meetings are via Zoom. If you would like to attend the talk but have not yet signed up for the MCQLL meetings this semester, please send an email to mcqllmeetings@gmail.com.

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!