Code Review for Scientific Software: Experiences building an online tutorial

Wednesday 20 Mar 2024, 17:00 → 18:00 UTC

Code-review.org is an online tutorial for code review made possible by the Better Scientific Software Fellowship. Code review is a skill. You can break it down, you can practice, and you can get better at it. The difficulty is you are often learning a bunch of other skills at the same time. Scientists are often working on a new scientific problem while trying to learn git, GitHub, a programming language, etc., all while someone ‘criticizes’ their code. In addition, scientific software developers may start work in a new and unfamiliar domain. It can be very difficult to separate criticism of the code from criticism of the person. Reviewing is hard; people truly need to take into account how to communicate constructive and actionable criticism. Code-review.org aims to provide a way to practice reviewing in a no-consequence environment using the tutorial. Experience with code review from the NCAR Software Engineering Assembly will be presented, including the positive and negative effects of code review.

More info: https://ideas-productivity.org/events/hpcbp-082-codereview