Customer-oriented development of complex distributed systems

Complex and distributed systems are more and more common. Hardware is going from strength to strength and is embedded in high performance peer-to-peer networks mostly. The task of a software engineer is to develop software systems which are able to take part in these new possibilities. Hereby, the drawback is the simple fact that such software systems and their modeling are getting more and more complex. If we are looking at the difficulties between customer and developer teams, especially misunderstandings between both, then the challenge to model customer oriented systems is even higher For customers it is hard to understand the frequently used terms, process models, and technological concepts. Developers have a hard time to understand domain specific processes and structures, and exhibit a tendency to abstract concrete examples to higher level constructs. These problems are especially hard to avoid during the development of dynamic, distributed Systems with multiple nodes and possibly asynchronous behavior. In our research we develop a customer-friendly reference model to demonstrate the aspects of dynamic distributed systems understandable to the customer This model presents and simulates the dynamic aspects of (distributed) systems without immediate abstraction from examples and allows for a stepwise generalization and evaluation with help of the customer team. In its final version the reference model will serve as a requirements statement for the professional developer. There are two issues we are going to discuss before we introduce our approach. First, we shortly survey the situation in the distributed systems domain. Secondly we pinpoint the importance of customer centered modeling by reflecting on the usual success rate of software projects.