Magna Labs presents at the ISMB 2024 Tech Track

The 32nd International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) was held from July 12th to 16th, 2024, in Montreal, Canada. Organized by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), this annual event showcases novel developments and scientific advances in bioinformatics and computational biology. We were thrilled to be part of this event, where our Custom Solutions Lead, Dr. Venus Lau, presented a detailed demonstration of Miqa—our no-code QA platform designed to make bioinformatic software evaluation easier and more efficient.

Automating Software Evaluation in Under Ten Minutes

At the ISMB Tech Track session, we showcased how Miqa can help research teams integrate automated testing into their software development workflow in under ten minutes. As defined by the FAIR4RS Principles, software is “the source code files, algorithms, scripts, computational workflows and executables that were created during the research process or for a research purpose”.  Whether you are checking if your software or pipeline runs to completion without crashing or comparing your analysis results against others in a benchmarking study, these are all forms of software testing. The more frequent and rigorous your testing is, the better you can improve the quality, maintenance, and reproducibility of your bioinformatic tools.

In our Tech Track presentation, we demonstrated how bioinformatic researchers and engineers can:

1. Quickly create new tests to validate algorithms and pipelines, starting from users’ output files.
2. Easily automate software tests by integrating directly with GitHub repos or continuous integration (CI) tools.
3. Turn QA test results into actionable data through interactive dashboards and longitudinal comparison to increase development speed and effectiveness.

Miqa streamlines the setup of custom software tests, ensuring that the tests can be executed consistently and frequently. This allows for continuous performance and quality tracking of bioinformatic tools to ensure their sustainable development from production to long-term maintenance - a major topic of discussion at ISMB 2024. Test automation with Miqa also minimizes the burden of manual software QA by enabling real-time bug detection and pinpointing the source of unexpected results.

Enhance Your Bioinformatic Development with Miqa

Missed our ISMB demo presentation or want to explore how Miqa can boost your bioinformatic development processes? Reach out to us at info@magnalabs.co, and we can tell you more!

Stay connected with us on LinkedIn for more updates. We are always rolling out new features to make software testing a more streamlined process in bioinformatics.

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