The 2021 COMPUTE Summer Retreat took place online on 23 August 13:00-16:00 and on 24 August 9:00-12:00. The topic was “Project and time management”, relevant to both PhD students and researchers. The programme included presentations, exercises and discussions about time management, project leadership, agile software development and related topics.

Programme

Monday 23 August

• 13:00: Introduction to COMPUTE by Sonja Aits
• 13:15: Time management, (Sonja Aits and Philipp Birken)
• 14:30: Coffee break
• 14:45: Project management (Sonja Aits and Philipp Birken)
• 16:00 End

Tuesday 24 August

• 09:00: Time and Project management, lessons learned (Sonja Aits and Philipp Birken)
• 10:00 Coffee break
• 10:15: Agile Software development, Emma Söderberg
• 12:00: End

Time management

Time management is about making decisions on the use of your time on the short term. How do you plan your day and your week? We discuss and practice techniques to do so and what to consider while making decisions on what to do next.

Project management

These days, research is often organized in, typically small, projects of one to several years. Managing your research project is an important task of both a researcher, but also someone working in industry. How do you define objectives for the medium term? How do you follow up? We discuss and practice techniques to do so.

Agile Software development

Software development often becomes a part of the day-to-day work of a researcher; maybe you need to develop scripts for your experiments, maybe you use scripts for your data analysis, or maybe you maintain code for your research group. This session will provide a brief overview of agile software development, which is a common practice in the industry, focusing on incremental development, fast feedback, and responsiveness to change. We'll focus on how to simplify sharing of code with version control, and how to increase code quality with continuous integration.