Engenharia de software aplicada a softwares biológicos: um estudo de caso em documentação de software bioinformático

Abstract

Software Engineering is the knowledge field that deals with the construction of computacional systems. One of its disciplines deals with system documentation, essential for the proper development of the project, the correct understanding of the software’s operation, its maintenance and user orientation. Biological software are computacional systems used in various activities related to biology and biotechnology, mainly used by researchers in biological areas. Efficiently documenting biological software can ease its use by interdisciplinary teams. It is assumed that Software Engineering, combined with an exploratory effort over the source code, may serve as support for developing bioinformatics software documentation. This work proposes to identify the most useful artifacts for the user of biological software, through a case study in which the documentation of a bioinformatics system aimed at identifying microRNAs in a given genome was carried out. The documents generated will help end users in using the analyzed system, and will provide means to other researchers who wish or need to perform its maintenance.