We were excited to hear from the EMBL-EBI (European Molecular Biology Laboratory - European Bioinformatics Institute) a non-profit organization and research institute that maintains the world’s most comprehensive range of freely available and up-to-date molecular databases. Because so many of their collaborators and staff are spread out across 20 members states, Redline has become crucial to adding everybody’s voice to their actionable Pivotal Tracker queue, without a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth emails. The EMBL-EBI’s project manager and software engineer, Kenneth Haug, talks to us about how they use Redline.
What does the EMBL-EBI do?
Developed in collaboration with our colleagues worldwide, our databases and tools span the full range of molecular biology, from nucleotide sequences to full systems. Our services let scientists share data, perform complex queries and analyse the results in different ways. Users can work locally by downloading our data and software, or use our web services to access our resources programmatically. Our websites serves millions of researchers, who are wet-lab and computational biologists in industry and academia working in all areas of the life sciences, from clinical biology to agri-food research.
How do you use Redline?
We have integrated Redline to our non-production MetaboLights websites and it’s integrated with our PivotalTracker account.
Most of the Redline bugs are submitted by other people at the EBI, but when we run training sessions we get Redline cases submitted from collaborators and new users as well. (We run a test data submission training session in our development environment.)
We have 85 redline cases in Pivotal right now, I think we started using Redline around November last year? This amounts to most of the recent cases we have logged in Pivotal, but in the beginning we did not use Redline as actively as we do now. I have exported the cases from pivotal since we started using Redline and about 1/3 of all cases originate from Redline.
This is the % of Pivotal cases per month created from Redline:
Now 2012 37%
Dec 2012 25%
Jan 2013 39%
Feb 2013 19%
Mar 2013 20%
Apr 2013 41%
May 2013 18%
June 2013 24%
What are some examples of how people use Redline?
Most cases are on screen content, but some of these cases obviously result in larger chunks of development.
