How to Enable a User-centric, Web-based Co-creation
          Process to Facilitate Software Demonstrator
            Development in Automotive Engineering
                                               Lukas Greussing and Markus Zoier 1


Abstract. Achieving optimal digital information supply from dif-        approaches to address this problem are full-stack isomorphic Java-
ferent automotive engineering domains has become an increasingly        Script frameworks. There are currently only a few up to date frame-
difficult task for supporting information management systems. Mod-      works avail- able in this domain, and one of them - Meteor2 - has
ern software engineering requires the collaboration of a variety of     gained a lot of popularity within the web-development community.
stakeholders – including the envisaged users – right from the be-       Meteor allows engineers to develop all application environments in
ginning of a software project and rapid value delivery as a goal.       one language, JavaScript. It embraces the JavaScript ecosystem and
Heterogeneous qualifications and insufficient software development      provides full stack reactivity, meaning the UI seamlessly reacts the
skills escalate the requirements to the underlying framework and sup-   true state of the application with minimal development effort.
porting platforms. One example to outline the challenge from above         A drawback of Meteor is the absent of a fully featured editor aim-
is the development of an engineering data management system for         ing end-user or semi-professionals demands and enabling effective
the automotive industry. In application- oriented research, experts     rapid prototyping. This talk provides insights into a project at Virtual
from the automotive domain, development process, internal IT de-        Vehicle, which was aimed at supporting a user-centric, web-based
partment and software suppliers usually have to design the envis-       co-creation process to facilitate software demonstrator development
aged IT solutions in an agile and interdisciplinary way. User-centric   at an automotive engineering company. It includes results from a
software demonstrator development can enable continuous concept         respective master thesis, which was dedicated to building a web-
exploration and allow ad-hoc user feedback for instant improvement,     based editor around Meteor to create web-based user demand driven
and is therefore a promising approach to cope with this major chal-     demonstrators. The generated code, styles and application structure
lenge.                                                                  follow common Angular2 and Meteor recommendations. They can
   From the software perspective, web technologies can help greatly     be easily customized and downloaded to provide an almost seam-
to achieve this goal. But the overwhelming abundance of software        less transition between the early prototyping phase and sophisticated
framework choices and their usually strict separation of server and     software pilots. Meteor in combination with the web-based editor can
client development and technology base increase the complexity of       facilitate the co-creation process between end-users and professional
projects and require in depth experience in frameworks. This fact of-   software engineers. It also assists in the software deployment pro-
ten prevents end-users and semi-professionals from actively partici-    cess by providing multiple strategies and supporting all major server
pating simultaneous in the software co-creation process. Promising      architectures.




1    Virtual Vehicle Research Center, Inffeldgasse 21A, 8010 Graz,
    email:{gruessing, zoier}@v2c2.at                                    2 https://www.meteor.com/