Course info

Nowadays, most researchers must write code as part of their research. In many cases they have had basic training in programming and data management during the degree and, perhaps, some postgraduate training related to statistics/data science. In other cases, they have had to self train. The result of this is that for many papers and projects, poor quality code is generated, with too many errors, it is poorly documented and it is also difficult to maintain and reuse. This makes it difficult to replicate the experiments, to follow open science best practices, to increase the potential for citation, to have consistent lines of work based on a code that is expanding and improving, and to onboard new researchers into these lines of work. 

The objective of this course is to ensure that the participants acquire some basic software engineering skills that they can apply in their daily research work. We will also provide them with a better perspective on what can be done using the appropriate techniques, so that they can plan their future training on this topic with better knowledge. This should also allow them to be in a better position to decide when it may be interesting to incorporate research software engineers into their future research project proposals and grant requests.