Overview

Teaching: 0 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• How to design research software

Objectives

• To understand design principles and to be able to apply them to research software

Why Design

• Investing some thought in design of software makes it possible to maintain\, reuse and extend it
• Even if some research software (RS) begins its life as a one-off use case\, it often gets reused
• Without proper design it is likely to accrete features haphazardly and become a monstrosity
• Acquires a lot of technical debt in the process

definition from https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2020/6/technical-debt-explained-plain-english

In many ways technical debt works like monetary debt. If you don’t pay it off it compounds. The more technical debt you accrue, the more unmaintainable your software becomes.

Many projects have had this happen to them, and most of them end up with a hard reset and having to start over again

In this module we will cover general design principles and those that are tailored for scientific software

Several books are available on the topic of software design

…. and many more

So why do we have this module in the bootcamp ?

Motivation and Objectives

The first and foremost reason is the same as for taking any course that has good textbooks.

A practitioner with experience can make the ideas more accessible. Instructor can perceive when attendees are not following and therefore can try to present the same idea with a different approach and/or perspective. Practitioners also bring their own intuition and experience to the discussion which tend to enrich the information being imparted in a classroom setting.

There are other reasons why software design needs to be included in a research software engineering training. Most of software engineering research and literature targets enterprise software that is in production. Literature is sparse even for exploratory enterprise software. One reason is that understanding the requirements and devising strategies for design of exploratory software is difficult. For industry it may not even be a worthwhile expenditure because before being released and utilized for production all software likely goes through rigorous quality control.

Research software in academic setting is different because it is also the production software. Often exploration and production go hand in hand, which means that quality control is an ongoing process. Therefore it is important to understand methodologies for designing research software that meets research goals while maintaining its reliability without becoming an excessive burden on the developers and the users.

Key Points

• Investing in design is critical for reliable, maintainable and extensible software