Project notes about the Gathering Requirements for an Integrative Biology Project. David Gavaghan, Jonathan Whiteley, Joe Pitt-Francis, Mark Slaymaker, Sharon Lloyd (University of Oxford),David Boyd, Damian Mac Randal, Kerstin Kleese van Dam, Lakshmi Sastry (CCLRC) Presented by Sharon Lloyd, University of Oxford. UK: Proceedings of the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2004. http://www.allhands.org.uk/submissions/papers/77.pdf and http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/ahm2004/presentations/77.ppt
- Use Cases and Requirements issues discussed, such as collaboration or competition in the future grid? Interesting findings include:
- User Fear (Whilst it is considered poor practise to build systems which the developers think are suitable for users without determining the needs, we have experienced a sense of either fear or "I don’t want to be the first" in providing information.)
- Difficulty in expressing scientific process. (In all but 1 case, the process resulted in the requirements capture resources writing the scenarios for the user. Often these did not result in scenarios as expected but a transcript of domain understanding. e.g. Code developed by Alan Garny in Physiology.);
- Collaboration or competition? (Our vision of researchers working collaboratively differs hugely from the collaborative work which exists globally at present. There are social as well as technical barriers to overcome. Clearly security of data and models will be a key aspect of building a system which is trusted by the user community);
- Users think they have no assets (Security analysis problematic as users do not identify anything they have as assets until you suggest removing them!)