Course materials for Research Software Engineering course.

Current plan for structure (as advertised):

Research Software Engineering

21st, 28th Feb and 7th, 14th, 21st March 2014 2:00pm - 5:00pm

Content: In this course, you will move beyond programming, to learn how to construct reliable, readable, efficient research software in a collaborative environment. The emphasis is on practical techniques, tips, and technologies to effectively build and maintain complex code. This is a short (15 hours over 5 half-days), intensive, practical course. The content of each of the 5 half-day units is as follows:

1. Code management. Collaborating around code. Distributed version control. Git. Github. Issue tracking. Code review and pull requests. Branches and merging. Software licenses. Citing software. Software sustainability.
2. Testing scientific software. Unit testing, regression testing. Test driven design. Expectations and assertions. Mocking. Build-and-test servers. Negative testing. Sensible error messages. Managed logging. Debugging and debuggers. Coverage measurement.
3. Best practice in construction. Comments. Coding conventions. Documentation. Refactoring. IDEs. Configuration files. Using libraries.
4. Design and development. Object oriented design. Software as engineering. Pragmatic use of diagram languages. Requirements engineering. Agile and Waterfall. Functional and architectural design.
5. Building and deployment. Build tools. CMake and Scons. Engineering for portability. Packaging. Deploying.

You must have reasonable experience in at least one compiled language, such as C++, C, or Fortran, and at least one dynamic language, such as Python, Ruby, Matlab or R. You must also have experience of the Unix shell.

Examples and exercises for this course will be provided in C++ and Python. You will therefore find it easiest to follow along if you have experience in at least one of these languages. Appropriate Python experience could be obtained from the Software Carpentry Bootcamp, while C++ experience can be obtained from the RITS C++ course. Previous experience with version control (such as from Software Carpentry) would be helpful.

You are required to bring your own laptop to the course as the classrooms we are using do not have desktop computers.