Challenge  I am an analytical research scientist at a biotechnology company that collects large amounts of  data. At present only a fraction of this data is used to derive biological insights, while the  remainder is stored but not analyzed. In an internal research & development (R&D) project, a  member of the Data Science team and I were challenged to create a new software workflow that  would mine this unused data and report key features. Within our collaboration, I understand the  data, how it is generated and how to interpret it, while my collaborator is an expert in algorithms  and software. The challenge was that, because the new software is intended as an internal R&D  tool rather than a customer-facing product, we were given only a broad mandate for what it  should do, without specific details such as feature requirements for the software, criteria for  success, or tools to use in accomplishing those aims.     Selection  We were able to construct a prototype for the new software by working from first principles and  without taking much time to reflect on the overall structure of the project. However, once we  began to process real data and iteratively improve the software, it became clear that we needed  a more structured approach to plan and prioritize the work remaining to be done. This task fell to  me because I have a fuller understanding of the project’s scientific context and overall goals,  while my collaborator is focused on execution. To this end, I chose the Visualization tool  because, as mentioned in module 1, it would help to make our ideas concrete and show us  options for further development of the software.     Application  In my implementation of the Visualization tool, I created a flowchart-like process map for our  software because it was a natural way to represent the path that data would take from input  (raw data) to output (key features). Each software process or algorithm was represented as a  node in the flowchart, color-coded by status, such as complete, in-progress, or new.  Conceptually similar processes were grouped together. Altogether, the tool was effective  because it provided a useful way to visualize the project’s structure and the status of various  work items, not only for my collaborator and me, but also for our managers, who previously had  only a general understanding of the software’s features and had trouble keeping track of the  specific details.     Insight  One of the immediate insights I drew from the visualization exercise was to determine which of  the existing software components were “good enough for now” while others needed further  refinement and/or testing. I also generated at least one new idea simply by mapping out the  software’s raw data inputs and realizing that one of them was completely unutilized. But  perhaps the most surprising insight came from mapping out the software’s outputs. Although I  thought I already knew what those outputs would be, being forced to spell out this information in  the process map led to another, critical realization – specifically, that implementing a novel type  of intelligent database search was the key next step for getting to the desired outputs. We then  focused on developing that search for the ensuing 4-6 weeks, and it led to a quantum leap in  our ability to process new features, which in turn attracted attention from our company’s  leadership team and won us additional resources for experimental testing.     Approach  Having experienced firsthand the power of the Visualization tool not only in organizing existing  ideas, but also in generating new ones, I strongly feel that it would be helpful to apply  Visualization at an earlier stage of project planning. I believe that, if we had done so in this  particular project, we may have saved time and allocated effort more efficiently: for example, we

could have identified and focused on critical components earlier on in the software development  process, and we could have avoided rewriting parts of the code to accommodate new features if  we had anticipated the need for those features from the start.

