A review of evidence-based best practices for developing research software in combustion

Modern combustion research, both computational and experimental, relies heavily on software and computational tools. However, due to a lack of saturation of modern, evidence-based software development practices, researchers often develop their tools in a manner that can take too long, lead to duplicated work, impede reproducibility, and lack verification. This article will review evidence-based tools and strategies that can save time, ensure trust in computed results, and encourage the adoption, further development, and reuse of research software in combustion and chemical kinetics. Techniques introduced include the benefits of releasing research software openly towards reproducibility; modern software documentation practices; version control; software unit, functional, and integration testing; continuous integration of software tests and automated delivery of software releases; benefits and best practices for peer code review; and appropriate software citation. These topics are explored using mature combustion research software such as Cantera and RMG, as well as newer packages like pyJac and PyKED, as examples.

This presentation was given at the 11th US National Combustion Meeting, held 24–27 March 2019 in Pasadena, CA, USA.