Decisions And Characteristics During The Development Process Of A Software Demonstrator

Abstract

Software demonstrators enable the transfer of theoretical concepts into industrial practice and therefore are used in various research areas. Although the stages of the development of a software demonstrator are already described in literature, it lacks an examination of fundamental decisions and characteristics throughout the development process. Characteristics, such as transparency, hold across all research areas and industries. A specification and extension depends on the individual use case. This paper describes the necessary decisions regarding the framework of a software demonstrator for data analysis in the field of production logistics and the characteristics applicable before and during the actual implementation of the software demonstrator. Key decisions are for example the design of the software architecture or the choice of the programming language. The characteristics equal the requirements to a certain extent and relate directly to the users and to the application itself. Discussions with companies from a wide range of industries revealed underlying conflicts and diverse priorities in terms of the aspects of functionality. Especially the size of the company seems to play an important role regarding the expectations of a software demonstrator. Therefore, the integration of potential future users into the development process of a software demonstrator presents a major advantage. It reduces the number of cycling stages at the end of the development process and increases the willingness to use the software demonstrator after its completion. As the objectives behind software demonstrators can highly differ in the field of production logistics, concepts of demonstrators and software engineering and the related objectives were examined. A demonstrator for determining the order processing strategy serves as an example of how these different approaches interrelate.