By Rebecca Murphy, a PhD student working for David Klenerman and Sophie Jackson at the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge.
Poor documentation, bugs, errors and spaghetti code: the problems in scientific software development are well known. My research field, single-molecule fluorescence (smFRET), faces an additional challenge: a complete lack of any standard software for data analysis. Each research group maintains their own code-base, with software written in programming languages from C++ to Labview.
Whenever methodological improvements are published, we…