Reproducibility

Tyler Littlefield · 2018/01/30 · 1 minute read

Welcome to SO. In order to answer your question, please provide a minimal, complete, and verifiable example.

If you’ve ever asked a question on Stack Overflow (SO), you may recognize the quote above. This is because reproducibility is incredibly important when asking programming questions and it’s often overlooked. To be brief, a great reproducible example should be:

  1. Minimal – Provide the least amount of code needed to reproduce the problem.
  2. Complete – Provide everything needed to reproduce the problem (packages, data, functions, etc.).
  3. Verifiable – Test your code and confirm that it reproduces the problem.

See this SO post for a comprehensive defintion of what constitutes a minimal, complete, and verifiable example. For discussion on reproducibility in R, see this SO post.

Additionally, here’s a list of some other things I think are important:

  1. Load the packages you need. Don’t ask/answer questions with library(tidyverse) when the user only needs dplyr.
  2. Avoid text heavy questions. Questions are often easier to answer with just a few sentences, data, and the desired output.
  3. Ask one question at a time. If you have another, post a different question rather than modifying the original.
  4. Use dput to copy/paste data and reprex for rendering your code.
  5. Avoid fragile and destructive code like setwd() or rm(list = ls()).