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The Benefits of Modeling in a Version Control and Collaboration Platform
Citation:
Ingwersen, W. The Benefits of Modeling in a Version Control and Collaboration Platform. ERS Modeling Summit, Cincinnati, OH, March 20, 2023.
Impact/Purpose:
This is for an invited talk at the USDA Economic Research Service Annual Modeling Summit with the theme “Good practices in managing model code and data—the benefits of GitHub and automatic documentation and testing.”
Description:
Building and evaluating computational models in research or application settings is often done with computer code among a team of subject matter experts.The simultaneous rise of cloud services, the git version control system, advances in computer languages in the data science arena, and web-based collaboration tools has resulted in resources that can be leveraged to great benefit in computational modeling.Developing workflows using these technologies for models sponsored by Federal Agencies can satisfy U.S.G. objectives of making source code open and improving the transparency of scientific work.Many USEPA models and software tool code repositories are now being developed and maintained in a USEPA github enterprise space. Among them is USEEIO, an environmentally-extended input-output model built upon an ecosystem of open-source tools that are all created and managed in public USEPA github repositories.I use examples from USEEIO and underlying tools to demonstrate the value-added of working in a version-controlled collaboration platform.I will cover the benefits of pull requests, release management, issue trackers, writing docs as code, wikis, and actions.