  Study reproducibility is essential to corroborate, build on, and learn from
the results of scientific research but is notoriously challenging in
bioinformatics, which often involves large data sets and complex analytic
workflows involving many different tools. Additionally many biologists aren't
trained in how to effectively record their bioinformatics analysis steps to
ensure reproducibility, so critical information is often missing. Software
tools used in bioinformatics can automate provenance tracking of the results
they generate, removing most barriers to bioinformatics reproducibility. Here
we present an implementation of that idea, Provenance Replay, a tool for
generating new executable code from results generated with the QIIME 2
bioinformatics platform, and discuss considerations for bioinformatics
developers who wish to implement similar functionality in their software.
