PI: Professor Holger Giese

Abstract

Design thinking is at its best if tangible prototypes can be used to capture existing users’ needs and envision new products and services. However, for complex software systems with multiple users today such tangible prototypes are not feasible in a cost-effective manner. To overcome this problem, we developed in the 2008-2009 project together with Prof. Weske from HPI a scenario-based prototyping approach for complex multi-user software systems that use executable software engineering models, both structural and behavioral models, and their simulation to make them tangible in form of virtual prototypes. In this follow up project we want to further elaborate the approach and in particular explore which simulation perspectives on the software engineering models are most appropriate for typical activities during design thinking such as media changes, refinement, radical changes, abstraction etc. The approach will support the stepwise and interactive enrichment of the software engineering models via the automatically derived virtual prototypes and vice versa. We further plan three experiments to evaluate our approach.