Software Engineering on The Carpentries

Software Engineering Practices in Science

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Dustin Heaton and Jeffrey Carver have just published a paper titled Claims About the Use of Software Engineering Practices in Science: A Systematic Literature Review:

ICSE 2015

Sun, 24 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Back when I was still trying to do science myself, my field of study was software engineering. The International Conference on Software Engineering is the big gathering for researchers in that area, and this year's has just wrapped up. Thanks to this Gist from Mike Hoye, I was able to browse the papers presented at ICSE and co-located workshops (like him, I'm outside the Great Paywall of Academia), and I've included titles and abstracts below from the ones I think readers of this blog might enjoy. They're only a fraction of what was presented, and I freely admit the sample is biased toward the things I understand and find interesting, but I hope they'll convince you that people are doing solid empirical studies in software engineering, and producing insights that we can and should act on.

Note: just over half of these papers (13 of 24) had an easily-findable version online. I'm not going to do the experiment, but I confidently predict that those 13 will be more widely read, and more influential, than the other 11.

Scientific Coding vs. Software Engineering

Sun, 08 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Daisie Huang recently wrote a great article for the Software Sustainability Institute's blog titled "Scientific coding and software engineering: what's the difference?". As a professional programmer who has become a scientist, rather than a scientist who's learned how to program, she has a fresh take on the differences between what those two groups do. Comments on her post would be very welcome.