> I've often heard it said that research code doesn't need as much unit > testing or code review as scientific code, but it isn't obvious to me > that the consequences of error are less in research code. Or better > put, it is obvious to me that that is so, but that is not a sign of > good health in our publishing system.
A nice observation. My experience is that most research code could benefit from from additional unit testing and code review, and that the _likelihood_(*) of error is at least as great as in more formally developed scientific code and industrial code, but the cost/benefit and consequence drivers don't currently make it seem sensible to most people developing research code. This may be changing - as more peer reviewers ask for code as part of the review it will shift, as would a greater benefit from people entering into collaboration because you've made your code available. As others have said, this makes it more "effort sensible" to put in place more formal onboarding and development processes. Best regards, Neil (*) Whilst I have a reasonable base of experience to say that most research code can benefit from additional unit testing and code review (as when we collaborate with groups we find bugs that would have been caught by both), it's much harder to measure whether the consequence of an error is more or less in a research code than a production scientific code or a commercial code. As with any error, it will be dependent on the location of the error, its effect and the number of users affected. And number of users affected tends to be tricky for research codes as there are unseen dependencies (e.g. the researcher who bases their hypothesis on something you wrote in a paper which happens to have a mistake due to an error in your research code). -- Neil Chue Hong Director, Software Sustainability Institute EPCC, University of Edinburgh, JCMB, Edinburgh, EH9 3FD, UK Tel: +44 (0)131 650 5957 http://www.software.ac.uk/ LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/neilchuehong Twitter: http://twitter.com/npch ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8876-7606 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
