Challenges in the Development, Distribution, and Maintenance of Software Visualization Tools in Biology and Medicine

Software visualizations remain and will continue to serve as an important tool for domain scientists in order to advance, communicate, and investigate science. In this paper, we present our findings on a case study of the challenges involved with specialized visualization software. Through this case study, we provide insights into why building software and tools for scientists is challenging. We provide several recommendations at the end of our work in order to progress forward the ability to improve software quality when developing critical software visualization tools in domains such as biology and medicine. Key Learnings: For tools that require integration and/or implementation of multiple programming languages 1) start early with the development on all target platforms and 2) look for where to reimplement a function rather than bring in code with many extraneous dependencies.