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Scientific software development takes far more than good programming abilities and scientific reasoning. Concepts such as version control, continuous integration, packaging, deployment, automatic documentation compiling, licensing, and even file structure are not traditionally taught to scientific programmers. The skill gap leads to inconsistent code quality and difficulty deploying products to the broader audience. Most of the implementation of these skills however can be constructed at project inception. The Cookiecutter for Computational Molecular Sciences generates ready-to-go Python projects that incorporate all of the concepts above from a single command. The final product is then a software project which lets developers focus on the science and minimizes worries about nonscientific and nonprogramming concepts because the best practices, as established by the Molecular Sciences Software Institute, have already been incorporated for them. This is a community driven project with widespread adoption across the computational molecular sciences. The Molecular Sciences Software Institute and Computational Molecular Sciences community also continually contribute and update the Cookiecutter for Computational Molecular Science, ensuring that the project is responsive to community needs and tool updates. All are welcome to suggest changes and contribute to making this the best starting point for Python-based scientific code.
Naden et al. (Tue,) studied this question.