Re-run, Repeat, Reproduce, Reuse, Replicate: Transforming Code into Scientific Contributions

Scientific code is not production software. Scientific code participates in the evaluation of a scientific hypothesis. This imposes specific constraints on the code that are often overlooked in practice. We articulate, with a small example, five characteristics that a scientific code in computational science should possess: re-runnable, repeatable, reproducible, reusable and replicable.