One of the most serious barriers to sharing code which scientists publish is the difficulty of creating adequate documentation to enable another person to properly build and run the necessary code. Not only that, but even with the most effort or best intentions, small changes made to their code may not make it into this package they are preparing for their peer scientist. These two reasons underscore the necessity of a better system for sending source code to a peer scientist and having them successfully build and run that code.

An aspect of computational reproducibility which doesn’t get enough mention is the compatability of research performed by different scientists. A scientist claiming to have the next greatest algorithm needs to prove it by providing benchmark tests. However if another scientist claims to have a better algorithm, we now have to go about comparing them in a fair way. For this comparison to be apt without any additional work, their algorithm analysis must be performed in an identical way. This is not true in general however. This essentially means that claims from two scientists can’t really be compared in an apples-to-apples fashion.