Towards a Digital Ecosystem for Rural Areas

Software and software systems are increasingly connected today, and the trend is continuing. The development of such systems requires competencies that go beyond classic software engineering. Key challenges are cross-domain work, increasing complexity with shorter time to market, shared responsibility and control across multiple companies, as well as the ever-increasing demands regarding security, user experience, and other qualities. In this publication, we share our software development experiences from the Digital Villages project. The major goal in this project is to support rural areas with digital services running on a platform. While typical software engineering activities such as design, implementation, or testing are, of course, necessary further on, evaluation and incorporating feedback from users play a far more important role when going towards digital ecosystems. Our results are based on a current project runtime of three years, and might provide background for others who want to shift towards developing such systems.