Overview

Testing Philosophy and Motivation

Rigorous testing has been and continues to be integral to our development approach of moving quickly and embracing leading-edge software practices. We believe that scientific code must be tested for the results to be trusted, and as the complexity of advanced algorithms and code increases, the burden of proof increases right alongside it. These practices have enabled us to design a novel, high-resolution model of Earth's atmosphere that is trusted by the Department of Energy to provide high-quality answers for the forthcoming versions of E3SM.

For these reasons, we devote significant space and effort to describing our testing practices in these documentation pages. This is not meant to make development more difficult, but, rather, to raise the bar of expectations for the next generation of scientists and research software engineers (RSEs).