sigcomm-reproducibility

Testing & Quality

Use when strengthening the reproducibility evidence of an ACM SIGCOMM paper — topology and testbed ledgers, traffic workload and trace provenance, configuration and version pinning, tail-percentile run counts and variance, legal data-release decisions, and consistency between the paper's claims and the artifact that backs them.

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Source SKILL.md: https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills/blob/HEAD/SIGCOMM-Skills/skills/sigcomm-reproducibility/SKILL.md

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SIGCOMM Reproducibility

Use this before submission and again before the artifact deadline. SIGCOMM's culture treats a result as a claim a stranger should be able to rebuild; reproducibility here is largely about whether the network conditions behind a number are recorded well enough to recreate. Reopen the current Call for Artifacts to confirm the process for this edition.

Evidence map

Map each reported number to a rebuildable location: a script, a logged run, a config, and the figure it feeds.
For every measurement, record the topology (physical or emulated), the traffic (workload generator or trace, with provenance), the configuration (every parameter), and the environment (kernel, NIC, switch firmware, data-plane toolchain).
For any stochastic result, report the run count, the seed or workload driver, and the variance behind each percentile — a lone 99th-percentile number with no replication is not reproducible.
Decide early what can legally ship: production traces and topologies often cannot, so plan a substitute with matching statistical character rather than discovering the block at the deadline.
Keep the paper and the artifact consistent; a figure the artifact cannot regenerate is a reproducibility gap reviewers and the AEC both notice.

The four ledgers

Ledger	What it records	Failure it prevents
Topology	Nodes, links, capacities, buffer sizes, emulation vs. hardware	"Which topology produced Figure 6?"
Traffic	Workload distribution or trace, provenance, which figure used it	Numbers that cannot be tied to an input
Configuration	Every parameter and its value per experiment	Silent knob changes between runs
Run	Seeds, replication counts, timestamps, variance	Percentiles with no reproducible basis

Maintaining these while you run is cheap; reconstructing them after the deadline is error-prone and often impossible.

Degrees of reproducibility

Turnkey     : one command rebuilds each figure from logged runs on a documented setup
Scripted    : scripts exist but need hardware, private data, or documented manual steps
Descriptive : prose detailed enough that a competent networker could rebuild the pipeline
Fragile     : results depend on unrecorded conditions -> a red flag to fix before submission

For SIGCOMM, downscaled testbed results should be turnkey because evaluators actually run them; full-scale hardware results may stay scripted with the deviation documented. State the achieved level honestly rather than promising turnkey behavior that fails on a clean machine.

Vignette: a wide-area measurement result

A paper characterizes loss and latency on a production overlay, then proposes a routing tweak. Its reproducibility spine: the measurement window and vantage points, the sampling method, the anonymization applied before any release, a public-trace or synthetic substitute for the parts that cannot ship, and a driver that regenerates the loss-latency figures from logged samples — plus one honest sentence about which production condition the substitute cannot capture.

Legal and ethical release

Real user or third-party-infrastructure measurement needs its handling addressed in the paper; anonymize before release and record what was removed.
Prefer an archival host with a DOI for anything you can ship, and document the exact reason for anything you cannot.

Output format

[Claim inventory] <number -> rebuildable location>
[Ledger status] topology / traffic / configuration / run — complete or gaps
[Reproducibility level] turnkey / scripted / descriptive / fragile
[Data-release plan] shippable / substitute (+ provenance) / withheld (+ reason)
[Paper fixes] <must appear in the main PDF>
[Artifact fixes] <what the package still needs>