PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In this chapter, we briefly describe the Git-based infrastructure that has been implemented as a result of the Conquaire project to support analytical reproducibility. The infrastructure implemented relies on principles of continuous integration as used in software engineering projects. Importantly, we rely on a distributed version control system (DVCS) to store computational artifacts that are key to reproducing the analytical results of an experiment. Using a DVCS has the benefit that artifacts can be versioned and each version can be uniquely addressed via a revision number. The DVCS implementation we rely on is Git, extended by GitLab as a web interface and collaboration platform. The heart of the infrastructure implemented in the Conquaire project is the so called Conquaire server. We assume that each research project deposits relevant data and code in a Git repository. In the background, a GitLab CI Runner on the Conquaire server is triggered by Git push events on the local GitLab server and executes a number of tests on the data and runs the code or script to reproduce a particular result. By this, we ensure that results can be reproduced independently of the original researchers on a separate machine. In this chapter, we briefly describe the infrastructure implemented and how tests are automatically executed when updates are committed to the Git repository.