Software development in disruptive times

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought challenges rarely seen before. It has made evident a world that is strongly globalized, capable, and characterized by a high interdependence of resources and means, which is also fragile and has a high potential for contamination in the physical sense and those concerning information, ideas, processes, and other aspects. The CEO of Quidgest, a medium-sized software house, identified the pandemic as an opportunity for the company and wrote a plan for creating a web-based software product, together with a preliminary list of requirements. The product, named VIRVI—Health Vigilance and Control Software, was presented as hyper-agile emergency software for global epidemiologic challenges. VIRVI is was an information system aimed at supporting the monitoring and control of a virus epidemic, like COVID-19, in any country or region, in an emergency timeframe.