Agile Development of a Digital Reading Device

Challenge

For a new product generation, the Method Park customer planned the introduction of a digital reading device which is able to analyze the company’s Lateral Flow Tests (patient quick tests).

The customer’s main goal was to provide its patients with even more reliable and safe test analyses. The device was supposed to support its users, by displaying appropriate animations during the test and by automatically transmitting test results to a laboratory or hospital’s Systems.

 

Duration of the project

3 Years  

Any Questions?

Any questions about our engineering service offers? Feel free to call us!

Contact card open Contact card close

Solution

The Method Park team took on responsibility for the realization of the user interface and the implementation of the underlying domain logic. The individual tasks included:

Solution

Definition of software requirements, derived from the user requirements provided by the customer

Realization of software design and its implementation

 Creation of unit, integration and systems tests

Standards-compliant documentation of development processes and results

As a process model, the Method Park team defined a process based on Scrum and the TIR45, compliant to established standards of medical technology, such as ISO 13485 and IEC 62304. The project team decided to use Embedded Linux as a basis for the device software and particularly considered requirements of embedded systems, by applying technologies provided by “Yocto”. The project team realized the GUI with a Qt framework, incorporating declarative language to describe user interfaces. The documentation was – to the extent possible – an automated part of the defined development process. Review logs, for instance, were generated from the review comments administered in Gerrit.

More Information

Automotive SPICE

Benefit

This agile development process, enabled the customer to give significant feedback and to have transparent insight into the current development state. This process also enabled the team to react to changes through the entire development phase and to implement them under strict control. The team was able to consider the results of usability tests during development to one hundred percent and without additional project delay.

 

Due to applied Yocto technologies, the Method Park team successfully piloted the software for the development platform on the target hardware, within less than one week. Additionally, the Yocto system provides a reliable source for embedding important security updates and the customer will also be able to ensure integrity and functional safety of the device in future years.

“The Method Park team collaborates well with our global development teams, they are also highly responsive and are able to take ownership of tasks and deliver results. This was also a major contributing factor to the high quality of the instrument software. Method Park is a reliable partner for successful agile development of software for healthcare devices.”

Based on the Qt framework, the project team interactively modelled the screens in workshops with UI designers. There was no inconvenient transcription from Wireframes or other HTML-based templates that were generated before. Features such as multilingualism or smooth transitions between different screens had already been supported by the framework. 

After project completion, the Method Park engineers transferred all tasks for software development and maintenance, to the software team intermediately built by the customer.

Customer Benefit

Establishment of an agile development process

Implementation of device software on Embedded Linux

Application of Yocto Technologies

Application of Qt as GUI framework

Questions?

If you have questions about our training center, feel free to call us!

Contact card open Contact card close