The Necessity of Interdisciplinary Software Development for Building Viable Research Platforms

Abstract

Developing viable and robust software is an inescapable artifact of graduate research. The challenges lie in the complexities of developing, deploying, and securing software to support the research objectives. Combined with the transitive nature of students, the management of the software development and launch process is an arduous task. A standardized framework for developing and launching complex software is required. Within a university, individual departments do not typically possess the expertise, resources, software and infrastructure to translate research results to a viable product or tool. Extending upon the research of Hilton et al., [5] we designed a software development pipeline in an integrated multidisciplinary research context. The integrated and collaborative software pipeline formulated from the onset of the project streamlines the development phase and provides an iterative feedback and testing environment. This approach is applied to the development of automated insulin delivery systems, with the synergistic efforts of interdisciplinary teams yielding a mobile application and server software solutions, and a framework for the iterative advancement of the software capabilities into the future.