Channeling Community Contributions to Scientific Software: A Sprint Experience

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5334/jors.96

Keywords:

code sprint, onboarding, hackathon, khmer, bioinformatics

Abstract

In 2014, the khmer software project participated in a two-day global sprint coordinated by the Mozilla Science Lab. We offered a mentored experience in contributing to a scientific software project for anyone who was interested. We provided entry-level tasks and worked with contributors as they worked through our development process. The experience was successful on both a social and a technical level, bringing in 13 contributions from 9 new contributors and validating our development process. In this experience paper we describe the sprint preparation and process, relate anecdotal experiences, and draw conclusions about what other projects could do to enable a similar outcome. The khmer software is developed openly at http://github.com/dib-lab/khmer/.

Author Biographies

Michael R Crusoe, Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University

Software Research Engineer at the University of California, Davis for C. Titus Brown. Common Workflow Language co-founder. Software Carpentry instructor and Debian software packager. Open Science Workstyle advocate.

C. Titus Brown, Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University

Associate Professor at UC Davis

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Published

2016-07-19

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2016)

Section

Issues in Research Software

License

Copyright (c) 2016 The Author(s)

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