as people are saying, the typical software engineering advice simply wouldn't work in a research context. one exception is the most basic stuff - people should

as people are saying, the typical software engineering advice simply wouldn't work in a research context. one exception is the most basic stuff - people should use version control, do light unit testing, and explicitly track dependencies. These weren't really done in the past but are becoming more and more common, fortunately. I think if software engineering experts actually sat down, looked at how researchers work with computers, and figured out a set of practices to follow that would work well in the research context, they could do a lot of good. This is really needed. But the standard software engineering advice won't work as it is, it has to be adapted somehow.