Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
chemists had used python and databases to create web pages before.
Moving to Django (or any web framework) was the next step in this
evolution to create more advanced web applications.
Django also provides a fl exible admin interface that allowed us to
quickly investigate different database schemas and relationships. After
multiple iterations in this environment, we created the core relationships
that still survive today. For pre-existing databases you can use the
inspectdb option, as opposed to defi ning a new schema [14].
Using the admin interface we produced many of the forms and views
that enabled us to speak to the customers and stakeholders who would
be using Design Tracker. This gave us an opportunity to gather
requirements and also to consider capturing additional data that would
be useful in further versions. One example of this was the discussions we
had with the synthetic chemistry community to try and understand their
requirements to support greater usage of the Design Tracker software
compared with the CoDD. It was from these efforts and the fact that
we could easily capture information using Django's admin forms that we
were able to map out their requirements and how the data would fl ow
through the process. The Django admin views quickly allowed the
synthetic chemists and teams to see the potential of developing the
software further.
The vision for Design Tracker changed at this point due to this
collaboration and we began to develop the software to not only capture
design hypotheses and associated compounds but also the ability to
assign chemists to compounds and design ideas. The chemists were a part
of synthetic teams that were created in Design Tracker and consequently
synthetic team views were developed to allow teams to see who was
working on what at any given time as well as seeing what compounds
and chemistries were coming through the design cycle. This allows
synthetic teams and projects to effectively prioritise work based upon
resource available and allows designers and synthetic chemists to improve
their working relationships through making compound design a more
transparent process.
We released version 0.9 (beta release) of Design Tracker at the beginning
of September 2008 after four months of development effort, including
time to learn Django, by one FTE computational chemist. We started
working with a single drug project team to fi x bugs for six weeks,
releasing minor updates on a weekly basis. At the end of the six weeks a
further project was added and we opened the development to
enhancement requests from the projects. We released new versions
regularly every two weeks to allow the projects to test the new features
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