[jurassic]

> Its amazing the amount of work today done by scientist at universities writing code without very basic software development tools.

I agree 100%. I recently quit my PhD so I still know a lot of people on the frontlines of science. One of these friends recently asked me to help them with a coding issue so they gave me an ssh login to group's server. I login and start reading the source.

It was all Fortran, with comments throughout like "C A major bug was present in all versions of this program dated prior to 1993." What bug, and of what significance for past results? Unknowable. As far as I can tell from the comments, the software has been hacked on intermittently by various people of various skill since at least 1985 without ever using source control or even starting a basic CHANGELOG describing the program's evolution. The README is a copy/paste of some old emails about the project. There are no tests.

So even though computer modeling projects should, in theory, be highly reproducible... it often seems like researchers are not taking the necessary steps to know what state their codebase was in at the time certain results were obtained.