As part of The BMS Lab’s services, Students, Professors, and Researchers tied to the University of Twente have access to the technical experts in the development team. If you have a registered and approved project with the Lab, the Development Team provides you two main services:
1. Consultancy
Help you with the further ideation of your project ideas and consult on the different possibilities available for your research project or course programs and/or;
2. Development Time
- Support you with the development of VR and AR environments
- Build software, apps, websites, and connectors or scripts
- Modify or add functionality in existing BMS Lab developed products
The Development Time can be used for two types of projects:
1. An 80-hour Project
The use of 80 hours maximum per project from the Development Team can be requested free of charge but the research needs to be registered far in advance. For Student projects, the collaborations typically take up to 4 or more weeks. For PhD or Professor projects, the collaborations usually take on-going months or years depending on the nature of the projects.
2. A Funded Project
Projects that are estimated to take more than 80 hours of time from the Development Team need to have their own funding. The Lab will charge you, the faculty, subsidies, or other external sources/project partners for the service provided by the Development Team.
Procedure
The procedure consists 8 phases from the moment that you navigate to this very page. Please note that the process might not always be linear and might be iterative (repeating various steps).
Registration and fundamentals
You register the project and fill out the development time request form below. This serves as input for phase 1. Projects might be deferred or rejected at this stage.
Scope evaluation
We evaluate your filled in development time request form and review the main information to determine the scope for the project and the basic architecture. Your development time request should therefore be complete, clear and thorough.
Introduction
We can consult on the design process, support you with workshops (if requested), wire framing and user story development. The importance of you following the Lab’s policies and conditions as well as the conditions and requirements (below) will be highlighted.
Specification
You provide us the methodology and requirements and work with us to form a full-fledged specification. It is important that you deliver use cases and scenarios that help establish the scope and requirements of the project. The final specification includes all the functional and technical requirements and a schedule. We can advice on technical requirements, prioritization of the requirements, arrange technical security aspects, and set responsibilities together.
Development
We will work on realizing the project or will set the contracted external development team in motion. Additionally, we will collaborate with you in co-creating the product and will keep you informed of any important updates.
First Delivery and Testing
An initial version of the product is delivered to you for testing and the project’s scope and requirements are verified. We will provide you with instructions on how to operate and test the equipment, tool, software, or environment. You will help create user documentation for the delivered product. If issues arise and can be solved, we will provide you with a solution. This phase might be repeated multiple times until a final product is delivered.
Data Collection
We can support you if questions arise or if some extended guidance is needed. You can also request data storage and processing support from the Lab and/or further support if needed from BDSI.
Research Analysis
Unless it is an ongoing project, this is the end of the project procedure with the BMS Lab.
Conditions and Requirements
We can only evaluate proposals that are adequately detailed, concrete, and follow the next conditions and requirements:
- The project is associated with the BMS faculty of the University of Twente.
- Project fits with the overall scope, mission, priorities and ambitions of the Lab.
- Project has realistic scheduling and time management. You have to take into account the time for us to collaborate, make adaptations if necessary, and for you to conduct the experiment. Our Development Team is busy throughout the year. Thus, to have a better forecast on how we manage all incoming project requests and allocate our resources and time of our developers, we strongly advice you to register your project early and consider the Lab’s time restrictions into account.
- Depending on the time required for the project, not all requirements can be completed. There needs to be a reasonable clear reasoning and link to your methodology in some cases and priority considerations.
- Development of project is a co-creation process between you and the Development Team. Thus, it is expected for you to be actively involved and highly accountable in the entire process. This includes testing, writing specifications, making design decisions, project’s end result, and doing some of the development work as well. The Development team is there to support and fulfill more complex development work that is expected to fit within the budget (if any). Smaller projects might be developed within the Lab. Other projects are send to an external development team. The Lab then serves as a medium between communication and project management.
- In general, the Lab does an initial check whether the delivered software meets the specifications and tries to identify and fix bugs before delivering it to you. You are then responsible for the final check of the software and for reporting back bugs in a timely manner. This method ensures that the agreed requirements are met and expertise and resources of the Lab is used as best as possible.
Most of the projects that are registered and approved by the BMS Lab have an employee of the Lab assigned as the Main Point of Contact and Project Leader. We will help you navigate the process. For more information on the process, conditions or requirements, please contact the BMS Lab.
Request the Use of Development Time
The form below can be used to request time from the development team. Filling in this form and meeting the conditions set out above are however no guarantee that your request will be honored. Lastly, the terms and conditions for software development support apply to any and all development activities. They can be found here.
Do You Have Questions?
Are you not sure how to proceed? Or, are you not sure that the project fits with the Lab? Then please contact us and provide us with information we can use to evaluate your proposal. More importantly, please include as much information from the form as possible.