[SciPy-User] peer review of scientific software

[Jerome Kieffer]

On Wed, 5 Jun 2013 23:08:10 +0100
Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:

> But... have you ever sat down and written tests for a piece of widely
> used academic software? (Not LAPACK, but some random large package
> that's widely used within a field but doesn't have a comprehensive
> test suite of its own.) Everyone I've heard of who's done this
> discovers bugs all over the place. Would you personally trip over them
> if you didn't test the code? Who knows, maybe not. And probably most
> of the rest -- off by one errors here and there, maybe an incorrect
> normalizing constant, etc., -- end up not mattering too much. Or maybe
> they do. How could you even tell?

I found bugs in scipy.ndimage.shift and in scipy.stats.linregress. 
The first took me ages to be spotted as I was assuming the error was on
my side as scipy was seen as a "large library widely used".

Cheers,

-- 
Jérôme Kieffer
Data analysis unit - ESRF

PS: I blame nobody: I probably write more bugs than most of you.