J Scott Long has written an interesting book on Workflow and Data Analysis using Stata. It’s good stuff but I was disappointed to see he makes no mention of make and Makefiles.
What’s make? It is a simple and powerful way of describing projects, designed initially for building complex C programs on Unix, but capable of being adapted to many other uses. One is the data analysis workflow, where there are many many steps between the raw data and the final paper.
So I was pleased to see (from a Gary King tweet) that the current newsletter of the Political Methodology of the APSA is devoted to workflow matters, and it contains a mention of using make for managing data analysis projects in Fredrickson, Testa and Weidmann’s article (though in the context of R and LaTeX, rather than Stata).