You have a piece of data-processing code, it works well, and both your colleagues and other researchers think it is useful. So, you decide to turn it into a Web Service so that it can be used by anyone with Web access. Yet do you know how to go about it? These Top Tips will help you get starte

Once your software development goes beyond simple hacking, your productivity will be improved by using a version control system (VCS). A VCS allows you to keep track of all the changes to your software during its development. It enables you to roll back the clock to see how something worked at any point in the software’s history. Simply put, I could not work without the peace of mind that the version control system gives me. And if you ever want to involve others in the development of your software (and you probably will), version control becomes all but essential.

By Steve Crouch, SSI Research Software Group lead.

This guide is the second in the Unit Testing for Scale and Profit series.

In our last episode we looked at the benefits of unit testing, and how it can help us automate the verification of correct behaviour with our software. After designing and writing a number of tests using the pytest testing framework, we were able to run them and see whether those tests were successful, and using a tool to measure unit test code coverage we were able to see to what extent they tested our code as a whole. But as our code increases in size and particularly complexity, we should expect our number of tests to increase too, which means more time writing tests. Fortunately there is something that can help with this burden which we'll look at in this episode: parameterised tests!jacek-dylag-nhCPOp4A2Xo-unsplash.jpg