36 ms·
I don't claim any expertise at all, but without documentation and tests (both of which are called out as largely missing for this codebase), how can the expert
by rpdillon 6y ago
I don't claim any expertise at all, but without documentation and tests (both of which are called out as largely missing for this codebase), how can the expert epidemiologists tell if the software is behaving correctly?
- matthewdgreen 6y agoI presume they run it many times and compare the final and intermediate outputs to reality, then adjust parameters and see how it performs under those parameters. And other models do similar things and compare to you. There are hundreds of papers on Google Scholar about epidemic simulation. This isn't an area where your performance is going to be determined by a few unit tests.
- rpdillon 6y agoSo the argument is that determining the correctness of the simulation is so complex that any kind of automated tests won't matter. The rebuttal makes a couple of statements about how scientists spend their time to verify their work: > Scientific software tends to be validated in a more ad hoc way. This is a domain-specific norm, not a matter of competence. > Practically every scientist I know spends most of their time checking their results rather than coding, and I sincerely doubt that the Imperial group is any different. I wonder if the team could iterate more quickly if some of these ad hoc validations were automated.