The idea behind the JBrowse project has always been to bring the standards of commercial software development to genomics.
JBrowse was originally an attempt to bring genome browsers up to the usability standards of commercial web apps. In the 1990s, bioinformatics led the web: Lincoln Stein (a co-PI of JBrowse) wrote the CGI.pm module that was used to power sites like Amazon in the early days, as well as his genome browser GBrowse. But by the mid-2000s, the Internet boom had left us behind. Genome browsers looked like MapQuest; we wanted JBrowse to look like Google Maps.
To bring industry UI standards to bioinformatics software development, we’ve had to adopt industry’s best practices. As a really basic example, JBrowse was arguably the first bioinformatics project to seriously invest in front-end developers primarily writing JavaScript. As time has gone on, we’ve embraced the label “ Research Software Engineer ” as a description of what we do. And we’ve adopted other ideas from industry, like Design Sprints and Agile methods.