At Digital Research 2012 we held a software surgery, inviting attendees to come along and discuss software development, project or sustainability questions with us. One of our visitors was Sonia Sciama, a researcher within the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. Sonia has developed an online psychology application, using Adobe FLEX, and wanted advice on its development.

Sonia's application shows a sequence of patterns to an experiment participant and records their responses to these. On completion, the application presents a summary of responses but these are not saved. Sonia asked whether her application could be modified to record these responses (for example by e-mailing them to her). This would allow participants to do the experiment in their own time, rather than Sonia being physically present with them. This would also allow analyses to be done across the responses from a large number of participants, yielding information of greater experimental interest. Allowing participants to do the experiment on their own creates another requirement - the ability to secure the application so that a participant cannot do the experiment twice.

Sonia discussed these requirements with me. Though I'm unfamiliar with FLEX, some Googling told me that Sonia's requirements would be straightforward to implement and I was able to give her an estimate as to how long this might take a competent developer. I also recommended that Sonia contact her web server maintainers, since introducing functionality to save data and secure a site could incur a need to configure server-side components of FLEX.

Sonia commented that "Talking to Mike clarified my ideas and helped me see that what I am trying to achieve might not be as complicated as I had thought. It also helped me to put my needs in terms that would make sense to software developer."

We plan on running further software surgeries at events next year.