Quality Assurance

GRNsight Gene Page Project Links
Overview	Deliverables	Reference Format	Guilds	Project Manager	Quality Assurance	Data Analysis	Coder
			Teams	Page Desiigner	Lights, Camera, InterACTION!	Gene hAPI	JASPAR the Friendly Ghost

The Quality Assurance (QA) team member is the resident expert on the gene data, ID systems, and formats. He or she should be proficient with Google Chrome Developer tools, code-savvy editors, curl, and the command line in general (as applicable) to check his or her team’s deliverable for accuracy, bugs, or any other quality-related issues. The QA is the bridge between the coders and the Data Analyst, integrating information from both parts of the team.

In many cases, the same person holds the role of Project Manager and Quality Assurance, as these two roles go together as the ones who ensure that their team’s deliverable meets the overall project’s requirements.

Guild Members

• Page Design: Hayden
• Gene Database APIs: Corinne
• JASPAR API: Quinn
• Interaction and Integration: Katie

Milestones

The milestones do not necessarily correspond to particular weeks; instead they are sets of tasks grouped together.

Milestone 1: Annotated Bibliography

• For the Week 11 assignment, the Data Analysts will work with the QAs to develop an annotated bibliography of papers that perform the global transcriptional analysis of DNA microarray data in yeast.

Milestone 2: Journal Club Presentation

• For the Week 12 assignment, the Data Analysts will work with the QAs to prepare a PowerPoint presentation to be delivered in class on Tuesday, November 21.

Milestone 3: Requirements Analysis

As the Coders begin their development work and the Data Analysts start working with their assigned microarray data sets, the QA team members should familiarize themselves with and help specify the expected correct functionalities of their respective teams.

• The entire QA guild should become an expert on the information that can be retrieved for a gene, so that they know how IDs should look, how certain data types will be displayed, etc. This will help them detect flaws and areas of improvement as development work proceeds.
• Page Design team: QA should get to know the information that is expected to be displayed on the gene page.
• Gene Database APIs team: QA should get to know how the four web service APIs are to be used in order to retrieve gene data given a gene symbol. They should be able to perform these steps themselves using curl or a web browser, so that they can provide independent verification that the Coders’ work is functioning correctly.
• JASPAR team: QA should learn about transcription factors in general and what the JASPAR database provides in particular. They should coordinate with the Coders to learn the API initially (since this API has not been seen before in class) then work out how to retrieve relevant transcription factor information for a given gene symbol. Once the steps are learned/discovered, they should be able to perform these steps themselves using curl or a web browser, so that they can provide independent verification that the Coders’ work is functioning correctly.
• Interaction and integration team: QA should be familiar with the vision of the project’s overall goal so that when they are presented with progressive builds of the project, they can test the functionality from end to end in order to detect flaws or points of improvement.

Milestone 4: On-going Testing of Respective Team Deliverables

The rest of the semester is expected to be an on-going process of verifying and validating the correctness of a QA member’s assigned team. Specific concerns include but are not limited to the following:

• Page Design team: Open the prototype web page and check it for correctness and clarity. The Data Analysis guild should also be consulted to make sure that the page design and layout meets their needs when they perform their respective Data Analysis tasks.
• Gene Database APIs and JASPAR teams: Manual testing will involve some combination of curl and web browser developer tool use in order to get to know the data returned by the various web services. The Coder members should find ways to show the Quality Assurance members the work-in-progress data returned by getGeneInformation, which QA can then compare to the raw web service API calls for accuracy. After the first integration milestone, QA members can examine the behavior of the prototype gene page at both the end-user and Developer Tools levels (i.e., examining network traffic to make sure the correct requests are going out with the expected responses coming in; inspecting the gene page elements to make sure that they received the correct data).
• For the Interaction and Integration team, prior to the first integration, QA can make sure that the “click-to-open-the-page” functionality works well and is bug-free. After the first integration, QA should work through the whole cycle of opening a gene page and examining the data that appear. QA should open multiple gene pages in the same session to make sure that successive gene page openings do not “step on” each other or leave behind obsolete data that “pollutes” future gene page loads.

GRNsight Gene Page Project Links
Overview	Deliverables	Reference Format	Guilds	Project Manager	Quality Assurance	Data Analysis	Coder
			Teams	Page Desiigner	Lights, Camera, InterACTION!	Gene hAPI	JASPAR the Friendly Ghost