The agenda for the next meeting of the Manchester Research Software Community has now been confirmed.
10:30 am – 10:45 am – Arrivals, Welcome and Overview - Aman Goel & Gillian Sinclair
10:45 am – 11:25 am – Presentation: “Agile Practices in Research Software” - Dr Ann Gledson
11:25 am – 11:40 am – Overview of GitHub Enterprise - Dr Andrew Rowley
11:40 am – 12 pm – Wrap up and Discussion
Agile Practices in Research Software - Dr Ann Gledson, Research Software Engineer, Research IT
The Research Software Engineering department currently services around 70 research projects at any given time with the collective pipeline of projects just short of 100. Our department of 48 engineers are dedicated to research and applying their diverse set of skills and experience to build research software for all manner of project types. However, managing the workload, relationships with researchers and ensuring successful, collaborative project delivery can be challenging.
According to the Scrum Guide, Scrum is a lightweight agile framework that helps people, teams and organisations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems. This, to us, sounds an awful lot like research! Agile ways of working encourage a mindset where changes in requirements are the norm, and where the solution development process embraces that change.
This presentation will introduce how the Scrum approach achieves by updating the requirements continuously throughout the duration of the project, and engineers work in short-term (2-4 week) cycles called “sprints” to deliver the next increment of the required output. We will also explain how we are adapting scrum into a flexible, lightweight version designed to help us deliver our service effectively and consistently to all research projects.
Overview of GitHub Enterprise - Dr Andrew Rowley, Research Software Engineer, Research IT
The talk will give an overview of the git version control system, what extra features GitHub provides for git repositories, and what additional features the University's membership of the GitHub Campus program provides for us and how we intend to make use of them.
To learn more about the community and its plans, have a look at the blog post from the summer which introduced the community.
Prior to the meeting attendees are encouraged to join the dedicated Teams community space - Computation and Data in Research (CaDiR).