An empirical or computational research project only becomes a useful building block for science when all steps can be easily repeated and modified by others. This means that we should automate as much as possible, compared to pointing and clicking with a mouse or, more generally, keeping track yourself of what needs to be done. This is a collection of templates where much of this automation is pre-configured via describing the research workflow as a directed acyclic graph DAG using Waf. You just need to: Use cookiecutter to install the template for the main language in your project (Stata, R, Matlab, Python, ...). Move your programs to the right places and change the placeholder scripts. Run Waf, which will build your entire project the first time you run it. Later, it will automatically figure out which parts of the project need to be rebuilt.