Development in medicine, makes it possible to personalize drug prescription, this is called: personalised medicine. However, this requires knowledge about the individual, thus the data in the DNA. So, for doctors to personalize prescriptions, they need that data. Something that is sensitive. You don't want to store data externally, but you also don't want to re-read the DNA every time. Via the 'Mijn DNA medicatie pas app' this DNA is securely stored on a self-owned device. With this data the app does some calculations and gets the advices from a backend. These advices can be shared with a pharmacy. The data is stored encrypted and can’t be accessed from anything outside the phone. It is also additionally secured with a pin code. The benefits of the app versus the already existing pass. Is that the privacy-sensitive data is protected. With the pass a fraction of the DNA data is accessible for everybody, with the app it is securely stored. It is also possible to save much more data than on the pass. This makes the app feature proof. Advises could be generated based on much more DNA data. This makes advises much more precise, as the knowledge about personalised medicine gets bigger.
At the start of the project, the requirements weren’t directly clear to us. In the beginning we had weekly meetings with our client to tune the requirements. It helped that he has a computer science background and thus knows the possibilities. It also made explaining things about software engineering easier. When these were clear we could develop the app and agreed to meet once every end of the sprint. Because we had thoroughly tuned the requirements and our client didn’t change his mind, we didn’t have to change our requirements to much. This process was very nice. He did change his mind once. This happened when the project further developed. The change came early enough, that we didn’t get delayed by that. Our client was very nice and thinking along. He made us feel that we were really doing something useful and that the project was not for nothing. This was very motivating.
Our team consists of 3 Data Science & Artificial intelligence and 3 Bioinformatics students. From the beginning on we were disciplined in the methods of scrum and project management. We were strictly holding on to our DoR an DoD and the scrum roles. The roles were product owner, scrum master, code reviewer and notulist. The strict task distribution in terms of the scrum, led to a smooth process. Thanks to this everybody could focus on doing his or hers own tasks. Thanks to our code reviewer, only clean and tested code made it to the main branch. This ensured we didn’t have to re-do things. In the starting phase of the project, many tasks were dependent on other tasks, so we couldn’t do many tasks. But slowly more tasks became available so the speed ramped up. Simultaneously the team began to know each other better and better. This resulted in a smooth process. For example: Help was asked quickly instead of waiting staying stuck. This resulted in a very smooth development process in the last few weeks of the project.