Artifact

In professional software development and high-impact computational research, code is never a static final document; it is a living system. However, for the purposes of scientific publication and project hand-off, you must be able to freeze your code at a specific point in time to ensure operational continuity.

To fulfill this requirement, your team will not simply stop coding at a sprint deadline. Instead, you will produce a formal Artifact by creating a GitHub Release.

By creating a Tag (e.g., v26.2.12), you are generating an immutable snapshot of your entire repository. This ensures that when the instructor (or a future researcher) clones your work, they are seeing the exact same code, documentation, and logic that you intended to deliver. We use Calendar Versioning (CalVer) to simulate industry standards. This practice prevents the moving target problem where minor, post-deadline edits might accidentally break a previously working pipeline.

Your final grade will be based strictly on the state of the repository as captured in your tagged release. If a fix or a piece of documentation exists in your main branch but was not included in the Release Tag, it does not exist for the purposes of evaluation. This process transforms your repository from a “scripting scratchpad” into a professional-grade software product that is ready for distribution or peer review.