Welcome to Life-Monitor

LifeMonitor is a service to support the sustainability and reusability of published computational workflows.

The collapse [1] over time of the software and services on which computational workflows depend is destructive to their reusability, and to the reproducibility of work for which they were used; this phenomenon can be caused by an API change that is not backwards compatible, a regression in a tool whose version was not pinned, a change in URL of an external resource, etc. Frequent testing is crucial to the preservation of workflow health, allowing to expose problems when they arise and providing a machine-actionable way to verify changes to the workflow structure. LifeMonitor aims to facilitate the maintenance of computational workflows, supporting their reusability over time, with a strong focus on testing and test monitoring.

The project’s main goals are to:

• Serve as a central aggregation point for workflow test statuses and outputs from various testing services (e.g., Travis CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, etc.).
• Facilitate the periodic automated execution of workflow tests.
• Integrate with WorkflowHub.
• Assist in test suite creation and workflow maintenance.

Road map

LifeMonitor is still in early development. Here is our planned development road map.

End of 2020

• Support for receiving workflow POSTs as Workflow RO-crate
• Relatively stable interface and implementation for test outcome retrieval
• Complete first draft of the Workflow Testing RO-crate specification
• Support monitoring tests running on external testing services:
  • TravisCI
  • Jenkins

Spring 2021

• Workflow Testing RO-crate template creation (integrated in ro-crate-py)
• Alpha release on https://lifemonitor.eu

End of 2021

• Command line client
• Web interface
• Support monitoring tests running on external testing services:
  • Github Actions
• Workflow submission from the Web interface

Later

• WorkflowHub integration
• Programmable periodic test execution
• Support workflow test creation
• Workflow maintenance plugins (e.g., Docker image linting)
• Automatic configuration of GitHub Actions for workflow testing

Acknowledgments

LifeMonitor is being developed as part of the EOSC-Life project

[1] K. Hinsen, Dealing with software collapse. Computing in Science & Engineering 21 (3), 104-108 (2019).