On 2 October 2018, Maria Cruz (VU), Marc Galland (UvA), Carlos Martinez (NL eScienceCenter), and Yasemin Türkyilmaz-van der Velden (TU Delft) facilitated a workshop titled “Software Reproducibility – The Nuts and Bolts”, as part of the DTLCommunities@Work 2018 event held in Utrecht, the Netherlands. An interesting report about the workshop and results and recommendations can now be found here.
The starting point for the workshop was a paper published in Water Resources Research by Hut, van de Giesen and Drost (2017), which argues that carefully documenting and archiving code and research data may not enough to guarantee the reproducibility of computational results. Alongside the use of the current best practices in scientific software development, these authors recommend close collaboration between scientists and research software engineers (RSEs) to ensure scientists are aware of the latest computational advances, most notably the use of containers (e.g. Docker) and open interfaces.
The participants discussed the merits of these recommendations and how they could be put into practice; and also what role the various stakeholders (researchers, research software engineers, research institutions, data stewards and other research support staff) could play in this regard. The participants also made recommendations for actions that could be taken at the national level in the Netherlands to raise the awareness of software sustainability and reproducibility and to implement the advice from the paper and the workshop. Read more
The workshop was a follow up of a first workshop in Delft: ‘Software Reproducibility – How to put it into practice?’. The report of this workshop has been published as preprint and the results of both workshops have been presented by Maria Cruz at 9th International Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE 6.1) on October 29. Her slides can be found here.