# A project-based course on software development for (engineering) research

## TL;DR

This paper presents the design and implementation of a 10-week graduate course focused on practical software development skills for research, emphasizing hands-on projects and open science principles.

## Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive course structure integrating software engineering practices into research training, with open materials and peer review for practical learning.

## Key findings

- Course successfully taught in Spring 2018 with 17 students
- Students developed research software projects with peer review
- Materials are openly shared via GitHub

## Abstract

This paper describes the motivation and design of a 10-week graduate course that teaches practices for developing research software; although offered by an engineering program, the content applies broadly to any field of scientific research where software may be developed. Topics taught in the course include local and remote version control, licensing and copyright, structuring Python modules, testing and test coverage, continuous integration, packaging and distribution, open science, software citation, and reproducibility basics, among others. Lectures are supplemented by in-class activities and discussions, and all course material is shared openly via GitHub. Coursework is heavily based on a single, term-long project where students individually develop a software package targeted at their own research topic; all contributions must be submitted as pull requests and reviewed/merged by other students. The course was initially offered in Spring 2018 with 17 students enrolled, and will be taught again in Spring 2019.