Simpliflying DNA Sequencing Analysis Through Streamlined DevOps

Background: The work we’re doing is for a global company that provides scientific instrumentation, software and services to healthcare, life science, and other laboratories in academia, government, and biotech and pharmaceutical industries. We had many technical challenges in our project, including building artifact distribution, identifying all warnings in code, automating build release workflow, headless testing, and data collection software which needs to be automated in its workflow. Because we have nearly 20 jobs in our enterprise Jenkins, we settled with Jenkins for all of our automation needs.

Goals:  To develop software that can help simplify DNA sequencing analysis on the fly.

Solution & Results: With the help of Jenkins, we have nearly 20 successful builds. Each resolves the requirements for that particular job. For example, one Jenkins job helps us identify all the critical warnings present in code whenever we push new code using the SpotBugs plugin — is a program that uses static analysis to look for bugs in Java code. This is very crucial for developers. Another Jenkins job was to automate build image distribution. This used to be very messy due to a lack of version tracking, especially with so many duplicate copies of builds. Jenkins helped us streamline this process with single deployment, track all versions, and allow wide distribution of builds among the team for testing, verifications, etc.

The key capabilities we relied on included creating local Jenkins jobs and using the Android plugin for SDK management and GitHub plugin to streamline copy cloning. We also love knowing that the SpotBugs plugin integration can read an XML file and show results on the dashboard when the build is over. That part is awesome.

Our top 5 results are as follows: