Neil Ernst
Dr. Neil Ernst is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria. Prof. Ernst and his students work at the intersection of software requirements and software design. His research leverages past experiences consulting with large government stakeholders. Current projects include analyzing software design discussions, technical debt in software, and engineering challenges in data science systems. Previously he was a senior researcher at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, and holds a PhD from the University of Toronto.
Session
How do you decide whether it’s better to adopt or adapt an existing package or build something completely new? What are the implications of outsourcing vs maintaining one’s own code? In this talk I look at how these decisions, perennial concerns in software engineering, are made in the astro community. Using several real world examples, I examine some common ways of assessing the tradeoffs with a view to minimizing long-term technical debt and getting out of the way of doing excellent science.