Development tools and best practices

Good development practices must be implemented, regardless of the size of the code, to facilitate the scientist’s work throughout the software’s lifecycle and ensure its longevity.

This becomes essential when the code is developed collaboratively.

These best practices are based in particular on tools that help to:

• managing different versions, upgrades and collaborative development through the use of version management systems (e.g. git) and software forges (e.g. gitlab),
• create appropriate user and developer documentation using documentation generation tools,
• follow construction/compilation/packaging standards (depending on the programming language) to facilitate portability and deployment,
• use the software simply through notebook services.