  The ability to repeat the experiments from a research study and obtain
similar results is a corner stone in experiment-based scientific discovery.
This essential feature has been often ignored by the distributed computing and
networking community. There are many reasons for that, such as the complexity
of provisioning, configuring, and orchestrating the resources used by
experiments, their multiple external dependencies, and the difficulty to
seamlessly record these dependencies. This paper describes a methodology based
on well-established principles to plan, prepare and execute experiments. We
propose and describe a family of tools, the LabWiki workspace, to support an
experimenter's workflow based on that methodology. This proposed workspace
provides services and mechanisms for each step of an experiment-based study,
while automatically capturing the necessary information to allow others to
repeat, inspect, validate and modify prior experiments. Our LabWiki workspace
builds on existing contributions, and de-facto protocol and model standards,
which emerged from recent experimental facility initiatives. We use a real
experiment as a thread to guide and illustrate the discussion throughout this
paper.
