Bachelor Thesis: A Toolkit for the Management of Reproducible Research Environments on Desktop Systems

Communicating all necessary steps to setup a desktop system – the exact versions of the operating system and applications as well as the locations were these applications were installed in and their configuration – is still tedious. Goal of this bachelor’s thesis is to develop a prototype of an open source toolkit that simplifies the process of creating and sharing such setups. Therefore this project consists of the following tasks. Firstly current standards and best practices need to be researched and tools need to be evaluated for their suitability. Based on these findings a workflow will be designed. This workflow in turn needs to be automated. To simplify the creation of new setups the files needed for the workflow will be modularized and templated. A web-based Initializer (cf. Spring Initializer) uses these modules and templates to generate new projects, based on a users input. Finally the toolkit has to be evaluated. A possible approach to do so is to identify a publication which describes another publication’s reproducibility as difficult. The setup of this base publication then could be automated with the toolkit to compare both approaches.