Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Results of the specification of the context of use and initial development of the product concept

Our results are summarized in the following file.

We have an excerpt from our interview.

We have a list of laboratory equipment to take into consideration.

We have a questionnaire applied to a support engineer currently involved in the development of Veterinary LIMS System.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Competitor's System Analysis

Today we filled out an application to access the Open-LIMS demo. Open-LIMS has been developed for biological applications. Although Open-LIMS is developed based on the ongoing requirements of biological laboratories instead of a veterinary, many of the functions overlap and we find it useful to analyse it.

The concept behind Open-LIMS is to create an open source project management suite which is independent of both organisms and structures studied. Open-LIMS can also be expanded with extensions. With this project laboratories increase efficiency in their processes allowing members to become more productive by decreasing management time, analysis time and data mining time.

Open-LIMS is based on a work-flow circle with different experiment phases. The phases are: Planning an Experiment, Running the Experiment, Entering Data and Sharing the Data. Analysis is not included as part of the program but it can be added as an extension to it. For our project we will focus on the ways in which Open-LIMS allows to enter data, analyse the data (extension) and the way in which the data is viewed or presented to the user.

Open-LIMS recognizes 4 types of data: files, values, methods and samples. Files contain previously saved information or information comming from laboratory instruments. Not all laboratory instruments generate files, they can also generate printouts, to enter this data manually the system allows to define the requested data as "values". The used hardware and software can vary depending on the domain are saved as "methods"(some hardware may be different in genomic labs and veterinary labs). Lastly come samples, the user is capable of adding the samples he has used or to link existing samples to a particular project (perhaps in the veterinary.

This post will be edited accordingly once the login details for the demo are provided.

Monday, March 7, 2011

Decision on the techniques to apply

We consider brainstorming among the team members to be a suitable technique. After the brainstorming session we can write the observations, comments, issues, and concerns on index cards or adhesive sheets to perform affinity diagramming on them.

To complete this process with the experience of one of our team members who has developed a similar LIMS system we can apply the personas technique. Our experienced member can take on the persona of a laboratory user and we can elicit requirements from him asking him about the goals he would like to achieve with the system and how he would go around those goals. For example, we can ask him what he thinks is the quickest way to assign results to samples.

A fourth and last option is to use a focus group. Our team members can get together along with a classmate that would be our moderator. We believe it would be possible to tape this session and include it as part of the deliverables from this project.