Goals for our software
Take some time to discuss these questions. Keep in mind that we are making plots for a paper, ask yourself how do that informs what we want from the software.
- What do we care about in terms of reproducibility? How would we remake the identical plots in two years if needed?
- Related, but slightly different question, what do we care about in terms of “provenance tracking”, i.e., knowing which data and software version were used to make a particular plot?
- What do we care about in terms of configurability in the plots? Are we going to be trying out a bunch of different versions of the plots? What are we going to be changing?
- How much do we care about consistency in things like axis ranges, axis labels, data selection criteria, etc…?
- Plots that are formatted for papers tend to not look great in talks, do we want a simple switch to make the same plots, but formatted for talks?
Let’s take about 10’ to come up with brief answers to these questions.
For what it’s worth, here is my take on those questions