Collaborative Software Development

Writing software is an integral component of the research activities of many astronomers. Increasingly, such software is written in collaborative efforts involving multiple researchers across multiple institutions. Despite this, training for astronomy students and early career researchers in best practices for collaborative software development is often informal and fails to make use of software industry knowledge. The goal of this course is to fill this training gap.

This course will take you through the various stages of software development that are typically encountered in a research project – from a snippet of code that demonstrates an idea, all the way through to a software package that can be easily found, installed, used, and credited by others. As part of this course you will have the option of bringing an existing software project, creating a new one from scratch, or using a pre-made example.