Virtual Soft
RO

Approach

Every project goes through the same five stages. The pilot feeds back into design until the laboratory works with a real group.

Delivery stages Five stages in order: analysis, design, development and pilot, delivery and transfer, support. Pilot results feed back into design. 1 Analysis process, constraint, indicator 2 Design scenarios, data, assessment 3 Development, pilot engine + domain pack 4 Delivery, transfer code, documentation, team 5 Support fixes, updates pilot results feed back into design

The stages

  1. Analysis

    Virtual Soft analyses the client's real process together with the people who run it, identifies the stage that limits the result and agrees what will be measured at the end. The output is a written description of the process, the constraint and the success indicators.

  2. Design

    From the analysis, Virtual Soft designs the laboratory scenarios, the synthetic datasets and the provoked failure cases, together with the assessment criteria. The client validates the scenarios before development. A sample laboratory sheet can be downloaded from the demo "Laboratory with a provoked failure".

    Sample laboratory sheet — Laboratory with a provoked failure

  3. Development and pilot

    The application is built as a shared engine plus a domain pack, on mature open-source components where they exist. A pilot group works through the laboratories, and its observations feed back into design.

  4. Delivery and transfer

    The client receives the source code, the licence, the technical and user documentation and a knowledge-transfer session, so that its team can run, change and extend the system. Every demo on this site has a downloadable technical sheet, as an example of technical documentation.

    Technical sheets of the demos

  5. Support

    After delivery, Virtual Soft provides fixes, content updates and assistance for the team that took over the system, under the terms set in the contract.

Working principles

  • The engine is separate from the domain content

    The same engine serves several sectors; what changes from one client to the next is the domain pack. The demos on this site are built the same way.

  • Open source where it exists

    Mature components with an open licence are preferred over building from scratch.

  • Source code delivered, no lock-in

    The client receives the code and a non-exclusive, perpetual, transferable licence, and can continue development with anyone.

  • Data processed only on the client's instructions

    When it works with the client's data, Virtual Soft acts as a processor (GDPR Art. 28), under a written agreement.