Research software engineering ("CodeRefinery in 1 hour")

"CodeRefinery in 1 hour" - What are good tools and practices in research software engineering?

• Latest presentation slides
• Published presentation slides
• Exercise repository

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Overview

• What is "research software"?
• CodeRefinery
• 6 most important topics? (in the HPC context)
• Exercises (separate webpage)

Version control

• Motivation for version control
• Commits: keeping track of changes
• Features: roll-back, branching, merging, collaboration
• Reproducibility
• Talking about code
• Collaboration through branches or forks
• Code review
• Where to start?

Documentation

• Why?
• Checklist
• In-code documentation
• Often a README is enough
• When projects grow out of a README

Reproducibility and containers

• 6 helpful steps
• It all starts with a good directory structure ...
• Recording dependencies
• Containers
• Recording computational steps

Building code with CMake

• Why is Make not enough?
• CMake is not a build system
• How do CMakeLists.txt files look?
• Why CMake?

Automated testing

• Technical possibilities
• Motivation
• Where to start

Sharing and reusing

• Why software licenses matter
• When should I add a license?
• Is your work derivative work or not?
• How do I add a license to my work?
• Make it persistent and citable
• Great resources