Astronomical Group Software Development Tutorial

CI: – Dr. B. Pindor

Writing software is an integral component of the research activities of many astronomers. Increasingly, such software is written in collaborative efforts involving multiple researchers across multiple institutions. Despite this, training for astronomy students and ECRs in best practices for collaborative software development is often informal and fails to make use of software industry knowledge. We propose to collaborate with ADACS to develop a tutorial framework which would allow a team of researchers to participate in a well-defined group software development project structured in such a way as to introduce the participants to key concepts and techniques. We would enact a demonstration of the tutorial as a team of researchers within the ASTRO3D Centre of Excellence and publicise our efforts to encourage the participation of subsequent teams. Facilitating distributed collaboration is one of the key goals of ASTRO3D and hence this training could naturally leverage the resources and organisation of the COE.
The long-term goal of the proposal is to create a reusable training resource which could be employed by future cohorts of students and researchers.