- What are the reliability and up-time requirements?
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Loss of scientist's data is inexcusable.
Downtime is less serious than data loss.
A regular outage overnight, e.g. for backups, would be acceptable initially.
Some crystallization facilities need 24*7 availability for recoding images,
but not for the user interface.
- What are the performance requirements?
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Most requests should be completed within 5 seconds.
If the response to a request could take longer than 10 seconds,
there must be an indication that the request has been received.
If a request could take longer than 30 seconds, a progress indication must be provided.
- What are the scalability requirements?
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The OPPF report that the greatest number of plates they have handled in a day
for crystallogenesis is 40.
Each plate has 96 wells and there may be several data items per well.
They hope to increase their throughput 5-fold.
They have greater throughput than any other stakeholder.
- The EMBL at Grenoble have a procedure for trial expression
which involves creating thousands of variants of the target, up to 17,000.
- This adds up to a requirement for no more than one request a minute,
with no more than 1000 data items for an average request,
and no more than 40,000 data items for a large request.
- The load from reporting is TBD (to be determined).
It is not acceptable that normal use of PIMS should be locked out while a report is being created.
- The total size of the database which we will plan for is records of 2 million samples.
This number may increase later.
- What are the safety requirements?
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Laboratories contain both chemical and biological hazards,
and in particular protein-production laboratories must conform to national
regulations for the use of GMOs.
- PIMS should provide links to COSHH data sheets for reagents,
or other national equivalents outside the UK.
- Some UK sites will want PIMS to record GMO safety assessments,
and only accept details of experiments
for which a safety assessment has been performed.
- PIMS must not give instructions to robots which conflict with safety rules.
To enable this, the code must be written in a way that
make it easy to validate its safety properties.
- What are the usability requirements?
-
Operations that everyone needs to do often should be easy to find and perform.
The user interface should use scientific terms in their usual senses,
and as far as possible not rely on new categories and concepts that are specific to PIMS.
The user interface should be as familiar as possible to users
who have used other web applications and Windows desktop
applications. E.g., we will follow the UI guidelines for naming
menus, buttons, and dialog boxes whenever possible.
Details:
- For each scientific goal for PIMS, there will be a help page
giving a general introduction and with links to the available functions.
- The help text that is provided in the data model
should be available through PIMS.
This needs to be reviewed by scientists.
- A printed manual will be delivered later.
There will not be a printed manual for the initial releases of PIMS.
- What are the security requirements?
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Some of the information stored is confidential.
Some of the information stored should be viewable remotely.
For more details see Security
- What are the supportability and operability requirements?
-
Ultimately, it must be possible to install and run PIMS
without having an IT professional on site.
This is not an initial requirement.
- What are the maintainability and upgradability requirements?
-
PIMS will be delivered in many increments,
so it's extensibility is more important than its current level of functionality.
- It is essential that when the database schema is updated,
the scientific data can be transferred without loss.
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Some laboratory techniques are still the subject of research,
e.g. screen design for refinement.
PIMS must provide a clean interface for plugins,
so it is easy to add new methods as techniques develop.