A Proficiency Test for Research Software Engineers

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-27 04:00:05

Back in 2014, I worked with Mike Jackson, James Hetherington, and Andrew Turner to develop a skills assessment for people who wanted to use the DiRAC supercomputing facility. It never really caught on—it’s politically impossible to tell professors who have already paid for machine time that their grad students don’t know enough about software development to use it efficiently—but I’m publishing it here in the hope that it will spur others to share what people ought to know and how we can tell if they know it.

If you are completing the assessment with colleagues, you are free to discuss hints, tips and the usage of commands, but do not share the answers to tasks.

If at any point you are unable to complete a task, feel free to move on to the next task. The major tasks (shell, shell scripts, testing, code review) are all independent. You may ask for help before moving on, but doing so will be considered equivalent to not completing that task.

Clone the exam repository at [URL provided]. This serves as both a repository and your working copy. You will do all of your work in this local repository and use version control to commit your solutions as you go.