Introducing reproducibility to students: request for community insights

[Pol Dellaiera]

Dear R-B members,


I am reaching out to seek your advice as I have been asked by Prof. Dr. Tom Mens to introduce the concept of software reproducibility to computer science Masters students at the University of Mons, Belgium (https://web.umons.ac.be/).

As part of Prof. Mens "Software Evolution" course, the plan is to have a 2-hour theoretical lecture and a 4-hour practical session in February 2024, entirely focused on explaining the theoretical and practical concepts of software reproducibility. To the best of my knowledge, it will be one of the only lectures on software reproducibility in Belgium.

In line with the community’s commitment to openness and collaboration, I plan to make all of the course materials publicly available.

Given the expertise of this community, I would greatly appreciate any input on structuring the course and on real-world examples might best resonate with students. Any practical advice on how to effectively communicate the long-term value of reproducibility, and how to offer students hands-on experience (taking into account their unfamiliarity with the concept) would be invaluable.

In the 2-hour theoretical session, I propose to introduce the foundational concepts. What is reproducibility? Where it comes from? Why is it crucial? What is the current state of reproducibility in 2024? Additionally, I will cover key tools (e.g., diffoscope, containers, digests, ...), briefly discuss the Software Bill of Materials and explore its implication in the Cyber Resilience Act.

The 4-hour practical session is intended to provide students with concrete hands-on experience with tools like Docker and Nix (and perhaps other tools), guiding them from completely non-reproducible use cases to near-total reproducibility. By doing so, I aim to demonstrate the practical relevance of reproducibility in modern software engineering workflows.

These initial ideas may evolve based on the constructive feedback I hope to receive from this message.


Thanks in advance for your time and valuable feedback and ideas.

-- 
-Pol Dellaiera-
  https://not-a-number.io/