From Scripts to Reusable Libraries: Packaging and Documentation (invited)

An increasing number of journals and conference boards are adopting policies to encourage reproducible research, e.g. by mandating the release of the experiment source code alongside the publication itself. Making the source code available is often not enough to ensure reproducible research. The released parts need to be set up in a way that allow other researchers to easily understand, reuse and modify them, a process known as packaging in software engineering.

This talk will present a set of good practices for packaging, with an emphasis on the tools available in python to help the scientist. In particular, we will show how one can use tools such as distutils and bento to automate the distribution and deployment of software, sphinx to organise, write and output documentation consistently, and how to make sure they fit together to enable actual reuse and sharing.