Best Practices in Collaborative Software Development: Lessons Learned in the Rosetta Commons

The Rosetta software (http://rosettacommons.org) enables structure prediction and design of biomolecules, including proteins, nucleic acids, molecular complexes, and symmetric assemblies. It is developed jointly by a collaboration of 50 research groups distributed around the world. We share the computer code on GitHub, where there are hundreds of active developers. New methods are shared instantaneously among developers, accelerating the pace of scientific discovery. To maintain the effectiveness and collegiality of this collaboration, we have built an extensive set of tests, code development tools, training courses, and documentation, and we use social media, team scrums, lab visits, an annual conference and organized outreach. In this talk, I will present our scientific environment, intellectual property agreement, test systems, communication and training tools. Finally, I will summarize what we have learned about best practices for building communities of scientific software developers.