# Panel: Making the Transition to Virtual Software Teams

- Event Date: 2020-05-21
- Location: Online
- Event Website: https://ideas-productivity.org/events/strategies-for-working-remotely-panels/#panel003
- Organizers: The IDEAS Productivity Project
			   
This event is a part of the "Strategies for Working Remotely" 
panel series, produced by the IDEAS Productivity
Project.
This online panel session addresses challenges in working remotely, with emphasis on issues faced by collaborating teams in computational research.

Resource Information | Details
:--- | :---			   
Panel Title | Making the Transition to Virtual Software Teams
Date and Time | Thursday 2020-05-21  3:00pm EDT 
Panelists | Jay Jay Billings (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), Mark Gates (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Mahantesh Halappanavar (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Angela Herring (Los Alamos National Laboratory), and Axel Huebl (Berkeley Lab)
Moderators | Ashley Barker (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and Elaine Raybourn (Sandia National Laboratories)
Registration Link | 	<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/strategies-for-working-remotely-making-the-transition-to-virtual-software-teams-tickets-104685978580?aff=affiliate2>
Series Information and Archives | <https://ideas-productivity.org/events/strategies-for-working-remotely-panels/> or<br><https://www.exascaleproject.org/strategies-for-working-remotely/>

**Panels are free and open to the public. Advance registration is required through the Event website. Archives (recording, slides) will be posted at the same link soon after the event.**

### Abstract
<p>Recently, many tools and workflows have emerged in the software
industry that have greatly enhanced the productivity of development
teams. GitHub, a site that hosts projects in Git repositories, is a
popular platform for open source and closed source projects.  GitHub
has encoded several best practices into easily followed procedures
such as pull requests, which enrich the software engineering
vocabularies of non-professionals and professionals alike.  GitHub
also provides integration to other services (for example, continuous
integration such as Travis CI, which allows code changes to be
automatically tested before they are merged into a master development
branch).  This presentation will discuss how to set up a project on
GitHub, illustrate the use of pull requests to incorporate code
changes, and show how Travis CI can be used to boost confidence that
changes will not break existing code.</p>
### Panelist Bios
<p>Jay Jay Billings is the group lead for research software engineering
at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Aside from leading the group, he
works on software for computational physics, scientific workflows, and
several Eclipse projects.</p>
<p>Mark Gates is a Research Assistant Professor at the Innovative
Computing Laboratory, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Since 2011,
Mark has worked in ICL’s linear algebra group, with both local and
remote members and collaborators. He manages the ECP SLATE project for
distributed dense linear algebra, which like many teams was abruptly
thrust into working completely remotely since March.</p>
<p>Mahantesh Halappanavar leads the ExaGraph project in ECP. He is the
acting Group Leader for the Data Sciences Group and the Team Lead for
the Scalable Data Analytics Team in the Physical and Computational
Sciences Directorate at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  In
the transition to working remotely, his teams have faced challenges in
management, immigration, staff engagement, and secure communication
tools. An important lesson we all can learn from this experience is
that the manner in which an organization treats its staff and the
local community will determine its success in the long term.</p>
<p>Angela Herring is a staff scientist at Los Alamos National
Laboratory. She specializes in leading multi-disciplinary, Agile
research teams. Currently, she leads two research software teams. One
team develops the remap software, Portage
(www.github.com/laristra/portage) as well as an interface
reconstruction library, Tangram (www.github.com/laristra/tangram). The
other team, Lynx, focuses on applications of code to code
linking. Angela received a M.S. in Mechanical and Aeronautical
Engineering from U.C. Davis in 2005 and a B.S. in Aerospace
Engineering from Mississippi State University in 2003.</p>
<p>Axel Huebl is a postdoctoral scholar at Berkeley Lab where he is part
of the ECP-WarpX team. Prior to joining a DOE lab, he contributed to
open source HPC software for about seven years, establishing
development efforts in teams that are fluctuating in availability
(e.g. students) or live in multiple time zones. One of his key
experiences from this is that communication, transparency of decision
processes, documentation and accountability are key for productivity
(and happiness) in decentral teams.</p>
### Moderator Bios
<!-- Panel 9 bio -->
<p>Ashley Barker is the Section Head for Operations at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) located at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL). The Operations Section is responsible for facilitating access to OLCF resources, providing training, documentation, and technical support to users, collecting and reporting on user facility data, and acquainting the public with the work conducted at the OLCF through scientific highlights. The OLCF supports more than 1,200 users and 250 projects annually from a wide spectrum of science domains. Ashley served as the National Climate Research Center (NCRC) Project Director from 2014-2016. The NCRC project represents a partnership between NOAA and DOE and through this partnership, the NCRC team has delivered multiple computer systems to NOAA, allowing the agency to advance its climate modeling and improve our understanding of climate variability and change. Ashley is also currently involved in the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) as the Control Account Manager (CAM) for training and productivity.</p>

<!-- Bio prior to 2021-05-20
Ashley Barker is the Group Leader for the User Assistance and Outreach
(UAO) team at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)
located at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL). UAO is responsible for
facilitating access to OLCF resources, providing training,
documentation, and technical support to users, collecting and
reporting on user facility data, and acquainting the public with the
work conducted at the OLCF through scientific highlights. The OLCF
supports more than 1,200 users and 250 projects annually from a wide
spectrum of science domains. Ashley served as the National Climate
Research Center (NCRC) Project Director from 2014-2016. The NCRC
project represents a partnership between NOAA and DOE and through this
partnership, the NCRC team has delivered multiple computer systems to
NOAA, allowing the agency to advance its climate modeling and improve
our understanding of climate variability and change. Ashley is also
currently involved in the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) as the
Control Account Manager (CAM) for training and productivity.
-->
<!-- Bio for moderator 14 -->
<p>Elaine M. Raybourn is a social scientist in the Statistics and Human Systems Group (Applied Cognitive Science) at Sandia National Laboratories. Her research focuses on virtual teams, methods for software productivity, immersive virtual environments, scientific visualization, and transmedia learning. She was the SC21 Scientific Visualization &amp; Data Analytics Showcase Chair. Elaine has worked remotely for a combined total of 15 years while at Sandia National Laboratories: from the UK as a guest researcher at British Telecom; Germany (Fraunhofer FIT) and France (INRIA) as a Fellow of the European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), and most recently as Sandia’s Institutional PI for the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Interoperable Design of Extreme-scale Application Software (IDEAS) productivity project. Elaine leads <a href="https://bssw.io/psip/">PSIP</a> and the ECP panel series <a href="https://www.exascaleproject.org/strategies-for-working-remotely/">Strategies for Working Remotely</a>.</p>

<!-- Bio for panelist 8
Elaine Raybourn is a social scientist in the Statistics and Human Systems Group (Applied Cognitive Science) at Sandia National Laboratories. Her research focuses on virtual teams, software developer productivity, virtual environments, visualization, and transmedia learning. She is the [SC21](https://sc21.supercomputing.org/program/posters/scientific-visualization-data-analytics-showcase/) Scientific Visualization & Data Analytics Showcase Chair. Elaine has worked remotely for a combined total of 14 years while at Sandia National Laboratories: from the UK as a guest researcher at British Telecom; Germany (Fraunhofer FIT) and France (INRIA) as a Fellow of the European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), and most recently from Orlando, Florida as Sandia’s Institutional PI for the IDEAS-ECP productivity project. Elaine leads [PSIP](https://bssw.io/psip/) and the panel series *[Strategies for Working Remotely](https://www.exascaleproject.org/strategies-for-working-remotely/)*.
-->

<!-- Bio for panelist 7 
Elaine Raybourn is a social scientist in the Statistics and Human Systems Group (Applied Cognitive Science) at Sandia National Laboratories. Her research focuses on virtual teams, software developer productivity, scientific visualization, and transmedia learning. She has worked remotely for a combined total of 14 years while at Sandia National Laboratories: from the UK as a guest researcher at British Telecom; Germany (Fraunhofer FIT) and France (INRIA) as a Fellow of the European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), and most recently from Orlando, Florida as Sandia’s Institutional PI for the IDEAS-ECP productivity project. She leads [PSIP](https://bssw.io/psip/) and the panel series [Strategies for Working Remotely](https://www.exascaleproject.org/strategies-for-working-remotely/).
-->

<!-- Bio for moderator 4 
Elaine Raybourn is a social scientist in the Statistics and Human
Systems Group (Applied Cognitive Science) at Sandia National
Laboratories. Her research focuses on virtual teams, software
developer productivity, and transmedia learning. She has worked
remotely for a combined total of 14 years while at Sandia National
Laboratories: from the UK as a guest researcher at British Telecom;
Germany (Fraunhofer FIT) and France (INRIA) as a Fellow of the
European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM),
and most recently from Orlando, Florida as Sandia's Institutional PI
for the IDEAS-ECP productivity project. She leads the panel series
*Strategies for Working Remotely*.
-->

<!-- Bio for moderator 2, 3
Elaine Raybourn is a social scientist who has worked remotely for a
combined total of 14 years while at Sandia National Laboratories: from
the UK as a guest researcher at British Telecom; Germany (FhG FIT) and
France (INRIA) as a Fellow of the European Research Consortium in
Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), and most recently from Orlando,
Florida as a member of Sandia’s Statistics and Human Systems Group
(Applied Cognitive Science) and the IDEAS-ECP productivity project.
-->

<!--- Bio for panel 1 
<p>Elaine Raybourn is a social scientist who has worked remotely for a
combined total of 14 years while at Sandia National Laboratories: from
the UK as a guest researcher at British Telecom; Germany and France as
a Fellow of the European Research Consortium in Informatics and
Mathematics (ERCIM), and most recently from Orlando, Florida as a
member of Sandia’s Statistics and Human Systems Group and the
IDEAS-ECP productivity project.</p>
--->
#### Contributed by [Jay Jay Billings](https://github.com/jayjaybillings "Jay Jay Billings's GitHub Profile"), [Mark Gates](https://github.com/mgates3 "Mark Gates's GitHub Profile"), [Mahantesh Halappanavar](https://github.com/mhalappa "Mahantesh Halappanavar's GitHub Profile"), [Angela Herring](https://github.com/angelaherring "Angela Herring's GitHub Profile"), [Axel Huebl](https://github.com/ax3l "Axel Huebl's GitHub Profile"), Ashley Barker, [Elaine Raybourn](https://github.com/elaineraybourn "Elaine Raybourn's GitHub Profile")

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Publish: yes
Categories: skills
Topics: online learning
Level: 2
Prerequisites: default
Aggregate: none
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