TITLE:
Laboratory Driven, Lean-to-Adaptive Prototyping in Parallel for Web Software Project Identification and Application Development in Health Science Research
AUTHORS:
Zachary Dwight, Alexa Barnes
KEYWORDS:
Agile Software Development; Bioinformatics; Lean; Prototyping; Adaptive
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.5 No.2,
February
27,
2012
ABSTRACT: Clinical research laboratories, bioinformatics core facilities, and health science organizations often rely on heavy planning based software development models to propose, build, and distribute software as a consumable product. Projects in non-agile software life cycles tend to have rigid “plan-design-build” milestones, increasing the amount of time needed for software development completion. Though the classic software development approach is needed for large-scale and organizational projects, clinical research laboratories can expedite software development while maintaining quality by using lean prototyping as a condition of project advancement to a committed adaptive software development cycle. Software projects benefit from an agile methodology due to the active and changing requirements often guided by experimental data driven models. We describe a lean to adaptive method used in parallel with laboratory bench work to develop quality software quickly that meets the requirements of a fast-paced research environment and reducing time to production, providing immediate value to the end user, and limiting unnecessary development practices in favor of results.