VAlidation of S-PLUS & S+ArrayAnalyzer

As a commercial software company, Insightful adheres to a strict set of Software Development Standards (SDS). The SDS, coupled with a Software Product Development Plan, allows Insightful to maintain a uniform development process. In order to control the quality of the development process, Insightful also maintains a Software Quality Assurance Plan (SQAP). The SQAP documents how the verification and validation of the software will be performed. In this case, verification involves the review and evaluation of documents, plans, code, requirements and specifications using checklists, walkthroughs, and inspection meetings. Validation involves the actual testing of the product using accepted testing practices for component, system and acceptance testing. We also use customer or external feedback for both debugging and product improvement. S-PLUS is a mature product and has been undergoing iterative improvement for over 15 years. S-PLUS has customers world-wide. You can read our customers testimonials at:

http://www.insightful.com/customers/successstories.asp

In addition, Insightful has gone to great lengths to test and validate its data analysis software. A complete battery of statistical accuracy tests is conducted on each release in accordance with the SQAP. Besides these tests, Insightful provides a built in function for validation of statistical results. Using the S-PLUS function validate, you can check the accuracy of S-PLUS algorithms and routines as they run on your system. The validate function draws upon a suite of validation tests which refer to published examples of both typical and extreme data sets in a variety of statistical routines and distribution lookups. You can also create your own validation tests and call them with validate, using the supplied test files as templates. The validate function in S-PLUS tests covers all the main functionality.

To run the validation tests, simply enter the following from the S-PLUS prompt (command line):

> validate()

This command will run all the tests available in splus/lib/validate. The code is all there, with references embedded in the code as comments. The validation suite is also documented in the S-PLUS 6 Programmer's Guide for Windows; pages 959-969.

The Insightful ArrayAnalyzer web-based solution sits on top of the Insightful server products, S-PLUS Server, which includes S-PLUS as the statistics and graphics engine. S-PLUS Server is a commercially supported product with Software Quality Assurance Plans similar to S-PLUS. The Insightful ArrayAnalyzer web-based solution includes ports from R to S-PLUS of the Bioconductor v1.3 libraries and an additional libraries created by Insightful Development.

S+ArrayAnalyzer 2.0 is a desktop product, which provides an add-on module to S-PLUS for analyzing microarray data. S+ArrayAnalyzer is a commercially supported product, which adheres to a Software Quality Assurance Plan. S+ArrayAnalyzer includes ports from R to S-PLUS of the Bioconductor v1.3 libraries and the proprietary LPEtest library. This module also has a graphical user interface making it easier for importing microarray data as well as quality control, class prediction and class comparison.

The ported Bioconductor v1.3 libraries within S+ArrayAnalyzer meet the same high quality standards of Insightful testing procedures. We have provided the authors of the Bioconductor libraries with feedback and corrections on defects in the original R Bioconductor v1.3 code that was used to create the Insightful ArrayAnalyzer web-based solution. We have provided similar feedback to the R Bioconductor community regarding corrections on defects in R Bioconductor v1.3 code that we have ported to create the S+ArrayAnalyzer module. These are leading edge solutions and we aim to strike a balance between exhaustive validation and making these tools available to our user base quickly. We leave major algorithm validation to the Bioconductor

Contact us for more information

To learn more about Insightful solutions for microarray analysis, please contact our sales team.