Hands-Free Research Workflow

Abstract

Over the last years, research has been placed at the core of numerous software products resulting from the ubiquitous presence of multimedia devices in our lives. Besides the need of acquiring specialized hardware, performing reliable and reproducible research requires the exploitation of specialized tools that are not traditionally present in the agile enterprise ecosystem. This might be a factor that ultimately draws many organizations away from introducing research into their software products. In this work, we propose a hands-free workflow that exploits widely available tools in the enterprise, like source control (SC) and continuous integration (CI) systems. We demonstrate that this workflow acts as a single-step end-to-end solution, maximizing the usage of the available hardware, and ensuring the repeatability of the performed experiments. The probability of human errors is minimized by automating all file transfers, and feedback is provided at the end of every trial with the location of the results. Generated artifacts are automatically archived, alongside the initial conditions of the experiment allowing for its full recreation. Although in our solution we exploit Git and Jenkins, this workflow can also be implemented with any of the SC and CI tools typically available in the enterprise.