Team:Michigan Software/Collaborations

Collaboration

Beta Testing Initiative


This year Michigan Software focused on beta testing as a form of collaboration. We sent out a call to all iGEM teams through several mediums, and received responses from the iGEM teams of MSU, Carroll High School, IIT Madras, Westminster University, the University of Florida, and our sister team Michigan Synthetic Biology. The teams followed instructions to upload a protocol and viewed several of the key features of our site, and were then asked to provide feedback. For example, they were asked what information might also be useful to have when searching for protocols. The complete survey guiding the testing can be found here (https://goo.gl/forms/TJOCenKrEzsICL2g1) (embed this later).


Through this collaboration, we gained quite valuable feedback and insight into how scientists and science students not only use our software, but how they see it and what improvements they believe we should implement. As a software team comprised mainly of computer science students, this feedback is essential to the further development of our software. It helps us determine whether or not our project is useful to the target community. In exchange for their feedback, we provided assistance to the teams with their wikis. If they encountered issues while formatting or styling their wikis, we helped them with the HTML and web design aspects, areas of software where we have expertise.