I am a researcher with 0 software development experience who is trying to refactor a piece of software for image analysis that a former post-doc left behind. Ma

I am a researcher with 0 software development experience who is trying to refactor a piece of software for image analysis that a former post-doc left behind. Many individuals in our lab (including myself up until recently) write software for analysis and simulation without any understanding of basic coding best practices such as version control, unit testing, documentation, formatting for readability, or even commenting. This comes back to bite our lab in the ass frequently. This occurs because many of our people take the code cademy course on python for example and then assume they "know how to code" when they finish; if they run into problems, they can simply consult stack overflow for anything they don't know. They therefore never learn anything about formal software development best practices unless they put in extra effort to do so, which they generally don't. I have learned a lot trying to refactor over the last few months, and I have tried to pass on some of this knowledge to my labmates. We have actually come a long way over the last few months. We now employ version control, use style guides, and more robustly document programs. I am currently trying to sell my labmates on the merits of unit testing but we'll see how that goes :)