  This paper describes the motivation and design of a 10-week graduate course
that teaches practices for developing research software; although offered by an
engineering program, the content applies broadly to any field of scientific
research where software may be developed. Topics taught in the course include
local and remote version control, licensing and copyright, structuring Python
modules, testing and test coverage, continuous integration, packaging and
distribution, open science, software citation, and reproducibility basics,
among others. Lectures are supplemented by in-class activities and discussions,
and all course material is shared openly via GitHub. Coursework is heavily
based on a single, term-long project where students individually develop a
software package targeted at their own research topic; all contributions must
be submitted as pull requests and reviewed/merged by other students. The course
was initially offered in Spring 2018 with 17 students enrolled, and will be
taught again in Spring 2019.
