also fun along that:

- oss-project implements paper in another framework. makes a small mistake to the paper.

- original lab takes the OSS code because they switch frameworks

- they find and fix the mistake

- sit on that for 2 years without doing a PR.

I've worked with "research" code and the lack of best practices is very true. Few to no tests. Little to no modularization or reuse. The same code copy-and-pasted all over the place. Reinventing the wheel poorly instead of using a 3rd party package/library. Dev environments that are difficult to reproduce since various pieces are either not checked in or in some external drive share. I won't even talk about the actual code itself.

In a related note of worst practices, the main research assistant (who was doing most of the lab's work) died unexpectedly and since no one was using any form of version control we couldn't find his code and data after his death. Which was doubly tragic because we were in the middle of a promising cancer drug trial and it sputtered out after the cell line testing because the original predictions and methodology were gone.

The solution from the PI was to have everyone buddy up and tell your partner where you kept code on your laptop.