A project-based course on software development for (engineering) research
This addresses the need for better software development skills in scientific research, though it is incremental as it builds on existing educational methods.
The paper describes a 10-week graduate course designed to teach software development practices for research, covering topics like version control, testing, and reproducibility, with students developing individual software packages for their research projects.
This paper describes the motivation and design of a 10-week graduate course that teaches practices for developing research software; although offered by an engineering program, the content applies broadly to any field of scientific research where software may be developed. Topics taught in the course include local and remote version control, licensing and copyright, structuring Python modules, testing and test coverage, continuous integration, packaging and distribution, open science, software citation, and reproducibility basics, among others. Lectures are supplemented by in-class activities and discussions, and all course material is shared openly via GitHub. Coursework is heavily based on a single, term-long project where students individually develop a software package targeted at their own research topic; all contributions must be submitted as pull requests and reviewed/merged by other students. The course was initially offered in Spring 2018 with 17 students enrolled, and will be taught again in Spring 2019.