Reproducibility plays an essential role in scientific research to ensure accuracy and serves as a foundation for future advancements. Scientific reproducibility becomes particularly challenging when dealing with vast amounts of input files that change hands or move across different laboratories or organizations. Preserving the provenance of data files ensures critical information about the originality of data files is captured to support the reproducibility of scientific research. The paper focuses on capturing and verifying input and output data file provenance using the principles of blockchain. The technique stores the hashes of data files in a database along with user and workflow information. It allows the workflow to verify the data against the hashes at any point. The method is demonstrated using Parflow, a Hydrologic model, as a proof-of-concept.

Context: Agile development methodologies in the software industry have increased significantly over the past decade. Although one of the main aspects of agile software development (ASD) is less documentation, there have always been conflicting opinions about what to document in ASD. Objective: This study aims to systematically identify what to document in ASD, which documentation tools and methods are in use, and how those tools can overcome documentation challenges. Method: We performed a systematic literature review of the studies published between 2010 and June 2021 that discusses agile documentation. Then, we systematically selected a pool of 74 studies using particular inclusion and exclusion criteria. After that, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis using the data extracted from these studies. Results: We found nine primary vital factors to add to agile documentation from our pool of studies. Our analysis shows that agile practitioners have primarily developed their documentation tools and methods focusing on these factors. The results suggest that the tools and techniques in agile documentation are not in sync, and they separately solve different challenges. Conclusions: Based on our results and discussion, researchers and practitioners will better understand how current agile documentation tools and practices perform. In addition, investigation of the synchronization of these tools will be helpful in future research and development.