Ten tips for conducting reproducible interactive computing experiments

In this recipe, we present ten tips that can help you conduct efficient and reproducible interactive computing experiments. These are more guidelines than absolute rules.

First, we will show how you can improve your productivity by minimizing the time spent doing repetitive tasks and maximizing the time spent thinking about your core work.

Second, we will demonstrate how you can achieve more reproducibility in your computing work. Notably, academic research requires experiments to be reproducible so that any result or conclusion can be verified independently by other researchers. It is not uncommon for errors or manipulations in methods to result in erroneous conclusions that can have damaging consequences. For example, in the 2010 research paper in economics Growth in a Time of Debt, by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, computational errors were partly responsible for a flawed study with global ramifications for policy...