Scientific software is increasingly becoming the backbone of obtaining and validating scientific results. This is no longer just the case for traditionally computationally intensive areas but is now true across a wide variety of scientific disciplines. This circumstance elevates how scientific software is developed, independent of the field, to a new level of importance. Further, the multi-institutional nature of many science projects presents unique challenges to how scientific software can be effectively developed and maintained over the long term. In this webinar we present the challenges faced in leading the development of scientific software across a distributed, multi-institutional team of contributors, and we describe a set of best-practices we have found to be effective in producing impactful and trustworthy scientific software.

Presenter

• Keith Beattie (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Presenter Bio

Keith Beattie is a computer systems engineer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) with experience in bringing modern, open-source software engineering practices to academic and research contexts. His interests are in understanding and addressing the unique challenges in leading multi-institutional, geographically dispersed scientific software development teams while still producing effective and usable software, particularly teams composed of members from scientific but not necessarily software engineering backgrounds. He has worked in industry as a software engineer and release manager and has been at LBNL for the past 20 years. He also tortures local music venue attendees playing bass in rock bands.