Simulation progressing

Thanks to Stephen Butler joining the project, the simulation work now is taking shape. We code in the Python programming language.

Stephen has done some work in investigating tools for the improvement of code quality. Thanks to these efforts, we are setting up virtual environments for the simulation; this makes it easy to replicate development on any machine, and reduces dependency complexity and management. We use the virtualenv tool for this.

Also, we are setting up testing infrastructure. In fact, we aim at a high coverage of tests for the functions the code is supposed to do. Of course, for anyone in software development, that means improvement of code stability and quality while facilitating integration, especially when multiple programmers work together (and, like here, not co-located). We think we’ll use nose as a python tool for continuous automated testing.

As a next step, we’ll implement some first core objects. As we favor agile development, we strive to include the user in shaping those core objects. For now, members of the non-technical stream of the project will take the role of the user.

We are quite excited as things now move on.