SoundSoftware 2012 Workshop

Yesterday the SoundSoftware project, which I help to run, hosted the SoundSoftware 2012 Workshop at Queen Mary. This was a one-day workshop about working practices for researchers developing software and experiences they have had in software work, with an eye to subjects of interest to audio and music researchers.

You can read about the workshop at the earlier link; I’d just like to mention two talks that I found particularly interesting. These were the talk from Paul Walmsley followed by that of David Gavaghan.

Paul is a long-serving senior developer in the Sibelius team at Avid (a group I’m interested in already because of my former life working on the notation editor aspects of Rosegarden: Sibelius was always the gold standard for interactive notation editing). He’s an articulate advocate of unit testing and of what might be described as a decomposition of research work in such a way as to be able to treat every “research output” (for example, presenting a paper) as an experiment demanding reproducibility and traceable provenance.

Usefully, he was able to present ideas like these as simplifying concerns, rather than as arduous reporting requirements. At one point he remarked that he could have shaved six months off his PhD if he had known about unit testing at the time—a remark that proved a popular soundbite when we quoted it through the SoundSoftware tweeter.

(I have an “if only I’d been doing this earlier” feeling about this as well: Rosegarden now contains hundreds of thousands of lines of essentially untested code, much of which is very fragile. Paul noted that much of the Sibelius code also predates this style of working, but that they have been making progress in building up test cases from the low-level works upward.)

David Gavaghan took this theme and expanded on it, with the presentation of his biomedical project Chaste (for “cancer, heart, and soft tissue environment”). This remarkable project, from well outside the usual field we usually hear about in the Centre for Digital Music, was built from scratch in a test-driven development process—which David refers to as “testfirst”. It started with a very short intensive project for a number of students, which so exercised the people involved that they voluntarily continued work on it up to its present form: half a million lines of code with almost 100% test coverage that has proven to avoid many of the pitfalls found in other biomedical simulation software.