Odum Institute: Modular design and automated testing in R

Modular design and automated testing in R

This 3-hour course will be offered via Zoom. Attendance is required as the course will not be recorded.

Course Summary:

Research is relying on increasingly complex code. However, most academics have not received formal training in software development. This course will introduce participants to some of the best practices of professional software development. Participants will learn to structure their R code into reusable functions and store those functions as separate scripts and/or packages. Participants will learn to write automated tests for their functions, to help confirm that results are as expected and to ensure that future changes to code do not cause unexpected changes to results. We will also discuss how to create reproducible “environments” that record package versions in use to help avoid package version incompatibilities and ensure that results can be replicated even months or years after the original analysis. The course will primarily consist of a hands-on exercise to restructure a single long analysis file into functions and automated tests.

Instructor: Matthew Wigginton Bhagat-Conway, PhD

Matthew Wigginton Bhagat-Conway, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning and a consultant in the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science. His research interests are in travel behavior, urban transportation, and statistical methods for transportation data analysis. He is available to assist researchers with statistics and data analysis.

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