HTS Bioinf - Overall process of work organisation
Projects at OUS
Larger projects typically have working groups, dedicated teams with a project mandate, plan, and regular meetings.
Bioinformatics-related tasks in such projects can need their own detailed specifications. Each project group has a leader responsible for progress. If the group leader is not from the bioinformatics group, there should be a bioinformatician responsible for following the project and gathering issues.
The bioinformatics coordinator has monthly meetings with section leader and bi-weekly meetings with unit leader to gather input on new projects, overall prioritisation and requirements, as well as to report status. The bioinformatics coordinator maintains a project list (really a list of epics), tracking the high-level status across all projects. This project list is used as high-level input when planning iterations.
Agile development
The bioinformatics group is today split into two teams, which follow separate light-weight Scrum processes:
The dev team develops ELLA and other products, usually in 2-week iterations, which are coordinated by a scrum master / ELLA product owner.
The rest of the team works mostly (but not exclusively) on tasks related to ensuring smooth production. This typically includes:
- production duty
- fixing bugs in production pipelines in-place
- production pipeline testing and releases of features
- regular data updates
- smaller projects that are prioritized by management
A goal is to work collaboratively on few simultaneous projects at a time. This requires that there is a sufficiently detailed work-breakdown structure, estimation, and coordination. Today the estimation of amount of work per task is done fairly approximately.