http://systemcall.org/wiki/ 2008-10-09T13:57:33-06:00 http://systemcall.org/wiki/ http://systemcall.org/wiki/lib/images/favicon.ico text/html 2008-06-05T04:45:54-06:00 Renato Golin http://systemcall.org/wiki/doku.php/softeng/acknowledgements?rev=1212662754&do=diff I'd like to thank everyone whom I discussed about software quality and bioinformatics, fellow developers and co-workers at EBI and SIB. Special thanks goes to André Uratsuka, Mauro Persano and Diego Souza for the long (long) discussions over the messenger, Daniel Barrel, Julius Jacobsen, Sarah Hunter and Michael Kleen at EBI for the awesome support on what really is bioinformatics and how the development of it happened, and finally Eric Jain and Nicole Redaschi at SIB for the long (long) discu… text/html 2008-06-05T04:31:28-06:00 Renato Golin http://systemcall.org/wiki/doku.php/softeng/start?rev=1212661888&do=diff The text is split in 4 parts: Part 1 is an introduction to bioinformatics problems in general and it's the reason why I started writing in the first place. Part 2 is a more refined list of software quality problems with specific examples from the bioinformatics community and a few generic principles to follow to increase quality. text/html 2008-02-23T08:24:21-06:00 Renato Golin http://systemcall.org/wiki/doku.php/softeng/basic_principles?rev=1203780261&do=diff As well as any other software process, the development in bioinformatics need to follow some basic rules to achieve minimum levels of quality. There are many definitions of quality even when restricted to software development. Quality Assurance is the process of auditing programs and procedures in order to ensure not only quality results but also consistent development techniques, decent code writing and good use of standards. Having good results is clearly not enough. text/html 2008-02-23T07:59:53-06:00 Renato Golin http://systemcall.org/wiki/doku.php/softeng/bioinformatics_and_its_problems?rev=1203778793&do=diff Bioinformatics and its problems Bioinformatics still is at its early stages, when formalism and quality are still driven by biologists. For centuries biologists are struggling to formalise biological data with a very limited success. Because of that, there is virtually one truth for every biologist on every field. This lack of agreement not only happens every day, it's accepted as normal and sometimes even considered a virtue. text/html 2008-02-22T08:52:21-06:00 Renato Golin http://systemcall.org/wiki/doku.php/softeng/conclusions?rev=1203695541&do=diff There are a few things I hope I could have convinced you and the most important is that Software Quality: * is expensive, but not having quality is much more expensive in the long run: The cost of unplanned changes, unplanned staff relocation, unplanned failures and outages and so on are only as big as the size of your own mess. As the rest of the universe, information systems' entropy will only increase if not actively maintained. * must be done by all teams and preferably all institutes:…