Project Information

Project:	PIMS
Interviewer(s):	Chris Morris
Interviewee(s):	Jon Diprose
Date of Interview:	20-09-04
Interview Location:	OPPF
Related Documents:	Project proposal > Target audience and benefits Glossary

Process impact: Planning questions for interviews with stakeholders is key to effective requirements gathering. Good requirements are needed to build the right system. These notes should be kept as part of the documentation on user needs are referred to when the software requirements specification is written or updated.

Interview Questions and Answers

Any previous experience with a LIMS system?

Nautilus for OPPF

Prioritize scientific goals in use-case-suite:

Target selection and Bioinformatics
Sample tracking

notes -refers to list of scientific goals

1. Target selection and Bioinformatics
1. We do target selection, often beginning by asking colleages "Have you got anything interesting you want us to work on?"
2. We do standard searches and look for glycosylation sites and protease cleavage sites
3. also check if anybody else is working on it
4. also check if genomic dna is available.

How will you decide whether PIMS is ready to replace Nautilus? Is there a particular area of work where PIMS might be introduced first?

PIMS will be phased in, begining with expression scale up, which is not covered by Nautilus.
This does not involve handling plates. (Linking steps is hard in Nautilus , which has prevented using it for expression scale-up)
At present we do trial expression and crystallization in Nautilus.

What other needs do you have?

1. We have difficulties reporting target progress to the EBI tracker.
2. We have several databases, PIMS must be able to handle that. However, Multiple LIMSes will be a stopgap measure, we aim for just one in use.
3. Instrument integration important, but later. Notably Acta FPLC for purification.
   Most fields for an experiment are standard procedure.
4. Some scripts run as cron jobs.

Other Interview Notes

ADDITIONAL NOTES AND ACTION POINTS:

• CM requested a brief statement of JD's goal for PIMS and contribution to PIMS, for the stakeholder list. A draft was provided for guidence


• CM: Do I understand correctly that one of your requirements is not to use Oracle?
  JD: No, the university has a site licence, we have some concerns but no requirement to avoid it


• PIMS needs to support running scripts -see "What other needs do you have? no. 4"
  Need more details of scripts.
  Investigate whether they should run overnight and possibility of producing report for output.


• Following developer meeting 2-11-04 additional requirements identified
  for Sample tracking would like to record:
  1. sequence of sample -DNA, protein
  2. what has happened e.g. translated into protein
  for Experiments:
  1. entering results
  2. image handling e.g. recording path to a stored image