Table 2

A summary of the organizations described in this report

Organization
Type
Application(s) and Users
Team Size
Previous Approach

Applied Biosystems
Commercial
A custom workflow engine as a component to be used by developers of products.
Two developers, a part time project manager, and a customer.
Approach based on the Rational Unified Process (RUP)
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Academic
A community tool to collect, analyze, report, and share genetic sequence data.
Four engineers for both developing this application and maintaining legacy systems.
Approach similar to the Rational Unified Process (RUP)
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Academic
A freely available, open source cancer pathway database with a growing array of public users.
One scientific lead, and one architect/developer.
None. Agile-like practices used since inception of project.
National Cancer Institute
Government (supported by a commercial contractor)
A variety of tools to integrate and visualize integromic data set that are made available to the public.
Three engineers and a bioinformatics analyst.
No explicit process
Northwestern University Center for Functional Genomics
Academic
Two projects written at the Center, with users onsite and at two other institutions participating in a consortium.
Three to five developers, domain and quality assurance staff.
No explicit process

Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Academic
A clinical support application.
Three developers and additional quality assurance and configuration management support staff.
A plan driven development approach that emphasized extensive up front design

Kane et al. BMC Bioinformatics 2006 7:273   doi:10.1186/1471-2105-7-273