A few more thoughts on communication, tech posts to come
I discovered recently on postgenomic.com that mine is one of the wordiest life science blogs around, so I’m going to try to be a little pithier. We’ll see if I can constrain myself.
In my last post I argued for the central importance of effective collaboration and communication in biomedical informatics. I wanted to list a few things that have worked for my teams in those areas. At Northwestern we worked on two projects. Neuromice.org is a phenotype database and virtual storefront for the mutant lines produced by three neurologically-focused whole genome mutagenesis efforts at Northwestern, the Jackson Laboratory and the Tennessee Mouse Genome Consortium. The other application, MouseDB, is an intranet (i.e. you can’t see it) colony and phenotyping management system for the mice under study at Northwestern (10,000 mice/year when we were in full swing). Each project had different challenges, but here are a few things I learned from those experiences. Some are pretty standard agile ideas, others less so.
- Each distinct customer/user subgroup should appoint a representative who speaks for that subgroup in all discussions of feature definition and priority. Keep the number of subgroups as small as possible (ideally, one). This greatly reduces the uncertainty and difficulty of scope decisions.
- Some users in the group might have no reason to use your software. Make this fact explicit, and don’t factor their interests into the product.
- Be completely open with your user community. Give them the opportunity to know everything you’re working on, and the reasons for (and the opportunity to contribute to) any decisions made about features going into the product.
- A development team should avoid making any decisions about scope or feature priority. Emphasize to users that it is in their power to steer the software toward the greatest possible utility. Technical improvements are a sticking point here, but we’ve found if you make a good argument for them, users understand their value and will prioritize them appropriately.
- If you let academics’ busy schedules eat away at your face time with them, you will eventually suffer for it. Be creative.
I think I’ve reached my word limit. Over the next couple weeks I’m going to let loose a flurry of technical posts on various topics that have been on my mind lately.