Hi,
I think you should add a section where to describe 'Test and Controls' in the 'Detailed view' for every workflow in myExperiment.
What do I mean?
Protocols and Pipelines are always tested, in experimental biology.
For example, let's say you want to design a new protocols for extracting DNA from blood samples.
You will have to spend much of the time on ideating controls that will allow me to demonstrate that my protocol is good.
You will need to demonstrate that PCR amplification doesn't amplify contaminations, you'll have to calibrate all the instruments, put control and comparison samples.
The same goes for any bioinformatics workflow. A pipeline for a scientific experiment should follow all the good laboratory practices, it doesn't matter if the instruments used are physical machineries or bioinformatics tools.
For example, I am going to write a script to calculate a statistics on a big amount of data.
Up to now I have thought of three tests:
- the workflow should fail if wrong input files are given
- the workflow should give me the right result when I ran it on testing data for which I already know the statistics value.
- If I create two random sets of sequences, one with more variablity than the other, the workflow should give me an higher output value for the first set than for the second one.
You should add a section where people can write with which kind of tests their workflows have been calibrated. Eventually you should put two sections, one with the tests that have already been executed, and one for the ones one should run each time he is using the workflow.
I think such a section would be very useful in myExperiment. Moreover, these test could also act as examples, so workflows will be easier to understand for other users.
I believe testing workflow is a very good practice, that unfortunately not many bioinformaticists are used to do :(. You should distinguish the workflows that provide tests description from the others, so people will be able to suggest how to design tests to people that are not used to do that.
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