Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
can maintain the environment with a small group of people as maintenance
and development becomes 'one and the same'. There is only a need for
one group - not a group to develop and another to maintain. Since 2004,
the Research Informatics group has consisted of seven people (six
developers and the head) placed at two sites supporting around 400
researchers, as well as data input from fi ve to ten CRO partners around
the world.
The aim is to get more coding and support for less money and people.
The Informatics group is placed in the centre of a network from where
we import and utilise the relevant tools from the network for incorporation
into our LSP platform. This setup is a combination of 're-use and build'
as very little is coded from scratch. Instead, we use libraries, tools and
frameworks that others develop and maintain while we concentrate on
adding domain expertise and the one-system vision to combine all tools
in the right way for us.
1.5 The 'ilities
In system engineering (software development) two different types of
requirements exist - the functional and the non-functional. The non-
functional, as the name indicates, does not concern what the system
needs to do for the user but rather
how
it does it. There are many more
or less important non-functional requirements like scalability, availability
and security often collectively called 'the 'ilities' [13].
Interestingly there is a tendency for management, IT, consultants etc.,
to put the 'ilities forward when talking about outsourcing, cloud
computing, open source software or anything else new that might disrupt
the 'as is' situation and shift people out of the comfort zone or potentially
cause a vendor to lose business. This is a well-known sales strategy
described as FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) marketing.
The part of the non-functional requirements that are viewed as
important by an organisation must apply equally to open as well as
closed source software. But this does not always seem to be the case.
Often the open source tools may receive more scrutiny than the closed
source commercial ones. It is not a given that a commercial closed source
tool is more scalable, reliable or secure than other pieces of software.
Certainly poor open source tools are available, as are good ones - just as
there are poor commercial tools and good commercial tools.
There is a tendency in the pharmaceutical industry to aim too high in
terms of the non-functional requirements. Naturally, the tools deployed
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