Introduction to software engineering

In this lesson we will introduce important aspects of software engineering, specifically version control with Git and testing.

This material is based on two CodeRefinery lessons:

• Introduction to version control
• Automated testing

Version control

In this part of the lesson we will see why everyone should be using version control, and become comfortable using Git to stage and commit changes, create and merge branches and resolve conflicts.

Automated testing

In this part of the lesson we will discuss why testing needs to be part of the software development cycle and how such a cycle can be implemented. We will exercise a collaborative testing/code review workflow.

Prerequisites

If you are using the virtual machine provided to you at the summer school, you will only need to consider point 2 below.

1. You need to have Git installed (see here for installation instructions).
2. You need to configure Git (see here).
3. You need a GitHub account.
4. You will also need a Travis CI account but you can sign into it with your GitHub account.
5. You need to have Python installed (we recommend Anaconda or Miniconda, see here for installation instructions).
6. You need the Python package pytest.