The conference will feature a mix of talks, posters, discussion workshops and hands-on tutorials. All together these will provide attendees with the opportunity to learn new skills, discuss the state of research software engineering, network and share knowledge. The conference will take place over two days, the 3rd and 4th September 2018 in Birmingham.
We are there with two talks!
Day One - Monday 3rd September
Track B Talks Theme: Software Engineering: Software Engineering Guidelines - From Theory to Practice (Tobias Schlauch, Carina Haupt).
Abstract:
Research software is mainly developed by scientists who are domain experts. Most of them have no specific education in software development. To support research scientists at the German Aerospace Center, we created a set of software engineering guidelines for different fields of software development. At RSE17, we already presented the concept of the guidelines. This time, we want to share the practical experiences we collected over the last year.
In this talk, we want to practically introduce the guidelines and the classification scheme. Particularly, we demonstrate their usage in context of two real-world research software applications. The first example demonstrates the usage of the guidelines when starting a new software development. In this case the focus is on finding the initial steps and getting an overview of future aspects. The second example is about an existing, legacy software application. In this case the focus is on analysing what is already there and finding out the next suitable steps. In this context, the accompanying checklists function as an ongoing planning document and the classification scheme helps to find the suitable starting point.
Day Two - Tuesday 4th September
Track C Talks Theme: Training and Support: RSE Training at DLR 2.0 - What we've learned from 1.0 (Carina Haupt, Michael Meinel).
Starting 2009, we give trainings for research scientists on how to use the software engineering tools Subversion and Mantis. In this talk we present the improvements which we achieved in the past and how they contributed our new GitLab based concept for our new workshop series.
Over the years, our training has become a well-received two-day workshop. The main goal of the training is to enable the participants to get started with the DLR software engineering tools in context of structured software development. Particularily, the combination of profound theory with hands-on exercises made it a valuable experience for the participants. Participants thereby are scientists from a wide variety of domains. In addition, a series of spin-off trainings was also established covering related topics like open source licenses or agile methodologies. However, our old tools are on the verge of being retried and a new system - GitLab - will take over. This gives us the possibility to restructure our training using our experiences, collected feedback, to create an updated version of our training. We will present this new concept, as well as why it became what it is now.