The lessons and best practices that have become required operating procedure in software development groups can often be applied outside the immediate field of software engineering. This article details a groundbreaking new, multi-year, large-scale biometric dataset that is designed to improve the accuracy and robustness of iris recognition algorithms. We identify several challenges associated with this collection effort and demonstrate how the application of software best practices was able to overcome these obstacles. We believe this list of recommendations represents the current best practices for large scale, long-term biometric collections.