01-introduction.md

title	teaching	exercises	questions	objectives	keypoints
Introduction	0	0	How to design research software	To understand design principles and to be able to apply them to research software	Investing in design is critical for reliable, maintainable and extensible software

• Investing some thought in design of software makes it possible to maintain, reuse and extend it
• Even if some research software begins its life as a one-off use case, it often gets reused
  • Without proper design it is likely to accrete features haphazardly and become a monstrosity
    • Acquires a lot of technical debt in the process
  • Many projects have had this happen
  • Most end up with a hard reset and start over again
• In this module we will cover general design principles and those that are tailored for scientific software
• We will also work through two use cases

definition from https://enterprisersproject\.com/article/2020/6/technical\-debt\-explained\-plain\-english