Akubio
Akubio is a company specialising in engineering laboratory instruments, such as Tecan robots, for drug discovery. Starting with a blank canvas, our work there commenced with requirements gathering and investigation. Liaising with scientists, technicians and engineers, we constructed an outline of what the instrument must do, who would be using it and how, and how it must communicate with the existing hardware and constructed a detailed plan in response to project management needs. The solution, designed using UML, was an application developed in C# and WinForms that implemented on-the-fly translation of flow diagrams into Visual Basic Script source code that permitted flexible, future-proof assay development by skilled users whilst hiding complicated concepts from novice users. Documentation was created using NDOC; Testing was undertaken using NUNIT.