abstract.txt

Versioned executable user documentation for in-development science tools
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José Enrique Ruiz1, Catherine Boisson2, Christoph Deil3, Axel Donath3 and Bruno Khelifi4 for the Gammapy team.

1 Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía - CSIC, 2 LUTH - Observatoire de Paris, 3 Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik,
4 APC - AstroParticule et Cosmologie, Université Paris Diderot.

One key aspect of software development is feedback from users. This community is not always aware of the modifications 
made in the code base, neither they use the tools and practices followed by the developers to deal with a non-stable 
software in continuous evolution. The open-source Python package for gamma-ray astronomy Gammapy, provides its user 
community with versioned computing environments and executable documentation, in the form of Jupyter notebooks and virtual
environment technologies that are versioned coupled with the code base. We find that this set-up greatly improves the user
experience for a software in prototyping phase, as well as provides a good workflow to maintain an up-to-date documentation.