Team:SJTU-Software/Notebook
Demand Analysis Report
According to the experiences the preceding iGEMers provided, we listed out the difficulties the teams may meet. First, most iGEMers are major in biology which means they are lack of experience in teamwork and using specific softwares for teamwork. Second, different teams have their different preference when choosing social software. So it’s very complicated to get in touch with others. Third, we found that if there was an institute for participants to connect and manage their laboratory, it would be much better.
Among the respondents, they prefer to use SMS, telephone calls or social media to get in the instant contact with other group members while participating in a group project. A few choose to use E-mails. So the software which can provide essential information about the project and instant member-to-member, many-to-many message pipe is of high demand.
In order to build an active community of synthetic biology and share information among different teams, it is quite important for iGEM teams to communicate or cooperate with other teams. The present methods are quite of low efficiency. Most of the respondents use social media. But the truth is that it is hard to build solid connection for the account run by a certain member of a team and other members may turn a blind eye to it. Year after year the account may lie idle and is only active when iGEM is ongoing. The iGEM committee devotes a lot to connect different teams around the world. We can see that they give TEAM PAGE a high priority on the official website but only some of the teams use it to contact others. Just finding the team information on the official website to contact them seems to be a solid way but it is time-consuming. So it is meaningful to build a platform to instantly communicate with any one in any team around the world.
While doing teamwork, file sharing is quite common in everyday work. Nowadays, most people use the IM software to send files one to one or share in a chat group which may be less reliable and cause redundancy. So the project-centered file sharing is necessary. What is more important are setting up of timeline, assigning and distributing tasks, showing deadlines of the tasks and dealing with the official check points. Workflow is the key of teamwork. Different teams have different work styles. Many teams do the work according to the calendar so a task management centering the main timeline is of great help. Of one accord, the respondents express their hopes for a teamwork platform especially for iGEM.
For lab information management, most of the iGEM teams don’t use any LIMS software for there is few accessible software and they are not easy-to-use for short term iGEM teams. And people use hand-write charts or simple test editor to record the consumables in the lab. So it’s may be a chaos in the iGEM labs consist of unwell-trained iGEMers and it can be even worse without enough communication within the teams.
After the framework of our software had been put up, we organized our team members to test the software page by page for several times. Through this process, we found out many bugs and fixed them to perfect it.
Having ensured that there are no lower-level mistakes, we released our software in China iGEM Discussion Group. Many teams gave their positive feedback toward our software. They were impressed by our design and tested it with enthusiasm. As they used different browsers, we could see more hidden problems. They gave us feedbacks about the typesetting and noted down their feelings when they used it. Meanwhile, they also told us some of their expectations to help improve the software. Besides, the members of 2015 SJTU-Software offered us some suggestions about the backend. After iMAP had been tested so many times, it became complete.
