Doit is a Python library for task management and automation. It provides a straightforward Python approach to manage and execute any series of interrelated tasks, such as in scientific data analysis. Doit can be used as a command line substitute for Make to drive existing tools/applications, or can be integrated directly with your application at the Python level. Task automation can be as simple as manually specifying a dictionary of dependencies, target files and actions, or as complex as automatically determining dependencies and whether a task is up to date using arbitrary Python expressions. This talk will give an overview of why and how to use doit for your project.

This talk assumes no particular background except some familiarity with Python, but is geared towards a scientific computing audience and will touch on automated data analysis as a motivating example.