Reproducibility

Reproducibility is the foundational guarantee of any serious analytical workflow. It is the promise that your work can be independently verified: that given the same inputs, the same code, and the same environment, someone else (or you, six months from now) can arrive at exactly the same results. But reproducibility is not just a technical property. It is a commitment to transparency and accountability. It requires that your workflow be open and accessible, that its history be traceable, and that it runs reliably outside of the specific environment where it was first built. These three requirements map onto the three sub-principles discussed in this section: openness, portability, and traceability. None of them is sufficient on its own. A workflow that is open but not portable is hard to run. One that is portable but not traceable is hard to trust. And one that is traceable but not open is, in many respects, not truly reproducible at all.