Following the ISO-25010 standard, we define the following quality requirements for our system:
- Time behavior: When a submitter uploads a sequence, then the sequence should ideally be available for querying within 10 minutes
- The exact behavior of an instance depends on the preprocessing pipeline which can be any custom code provided by the maintainer. Thus, we do not have a strict requirement here.
- Time behavior: When a user queries a sequence, then the query should return within 1 second.
- Operability: A maintainer should be able to set up a new Loculus instance from reading the documentation.
- Integrity: Only submitters belonging to the respective group and superusers (i.e., curators) should be able to make changes on sequence data.
We also identified two quality requirements that don't fit into the ISO-25010 standard:
- The Loculus project is transparent. Important decisions are publicly documented. Users can comprehend how Loculus works and how the data is processed.
- It is comprehensible when and by whom data were submitted and changed. This is important for the reproducibility of scientific analyses and so that submitters can be credited appropriately for their work (e.g. by citing their data in a publication).