Practical Course Requirements Engineering

Practical course

Digital Product Innovation and Development

Practical course

Collaboratively with Technical University Munich (TUM), we offer a brand new practical course. We partner with Netlight, Itestra and Siemens to provide students with the opportunity to take on the role of a tech consultant and experience the whole process of digital product innovation and development.


About the Practical Course

This hands-on course is designed for students to experience the whole process of digital product innovation and development. Throughout the semester, students will collaborate in groups, each tasked with addressing one distinct industry challenge. These challenges serve as the “starting point” for developing innovative digital products from requirements to prototype. Each team will be guided by a mentor. 

Once challenges are selected, teams will work in sprints of two weeks and demonstrate their intermediate results to ensure crafting a compelling business idea that addresses the given challenge. The teams then translate their ideas into a strategic product plan, prior to elaborating an initial set of requirements. In parallel, students design the architecture of their digital product, outlining the technical framework, features, and the technology stack deemed ideal for implementation. As the semester progresses, students refine their prototypes and prepare to showcase their accomplishments. 

The final phase culminates in a joint event where each group presents their prototype, business plan, and implementation strategy. By the end of the course, students will have gained a holistic understanding of the digital product development lifecycle in real-world environments and be well-equipped to navigate the dynamic landscape of digital innovation.

2025 Challenges

Industry Partner: 
Itestra


Problem: 
Itestra organises several internal events each year to foster employee connection across different locations, roles, and teams. However, manually planning interactions and seating arrangements to optimise networking and engagement is inefficient and lacks scalability. There is currently no system to systematically match employees based on relevant criteria or track previous connections. A tailored, constraint-aware application is needed to facilitate dynamic employee matching and enhance networking outcomes at events. 

Solution: 
The students developed a web-based application that enables dynamic employee matching for company events such as networking dinners and speed-meeting sessions. The tool allows organizers to import employee data, define matching constraints, and automatically generate optimized seating and interaction plans. It tracks previous matches, supports multiple event formats, and includes a flexible interface for administrators to adjust inputs as needed. This student project demonstrated how algorithm-driven planning can meaningfully improve engagement and social connectivity within a growing organization like Itestra.

GitHub: Event-Exchange-Platform

Industry Partner: 
Blekinge Institute of Technology


Problem: 
Code review processes often lack the necessary context for evaluating GUI-based tests, which results in inconsistent feedback and reduced test quality. Current review tools focus primarily on source code and do not effectively address the needs of testers reviewing front-end interactions. This forces testers to conduct reviews manually on their own machines and creates a fragmented workflow. A solution is needed that integrates GUI-relevant context into code reviews to improve collaboration, transparency, and test effectiveness.

Solution: 
The students implemented a GitHub-Action to enrich code reviews with visual and contextual information about GUIbased tests. Their tool automatically extracts relevant information, highlights changes based on structured checklists tailored to GUI testing needs. The project proved the value of context-aware review tools in improving test quality, collaboration, and feedback clarity in modern software development workflows.

GitHub: Code-Reviews-of-GUI-Tests

Industry Partner: 
Siemens


Problem: 
Problem: Big corporations invest billions in research and development annually, yet lack a centralised, accessible view of how their research efforts perform across domains. Metrics like patents, collaborations, and impact are scattered and not easily linked to strategic insights. Decision-makers lack the ability to pinpoint strengths, gaps, and opportunities for collaboration in specific research fields. A platform is needed that enables real-time analysis of an organisation's research position to support data-driven strategy in innovation management.

Solution: 
The students developed a web-based analytics dashboard to give researchers and managers on-demand visibility into the organisation's research landscape. The platform aggregates data on publications, collaborations, and key performance indicators, enabling users to explore strengths and gaps across domains. It supports slicing by topics, authors, and impact metrics, enabling informed decision-making. This work demonstrated the potential of centralised data platforms to inform decision-making and enhance

GitHub: Research-Position-Analysis-Platform

Industry Partner: 
Brivalo


Problem: 
AI-assisted code generation is becoming increasingly common, but its outputs often vary depending on phrasing, order of prompts, or even slight context changes. This unpredictability makes it difficult for development teams to rely on AI tools consistently in industrial or even regulated environments. Without consistently predictable code generation, teams face challenges in producing high-quality products and enforcing standards. A solution is needed to make AI-generated code more deterministic, consistent, and predictable—especially when used in professional software development environments.

Solution: 
The students built a prototype system that enhances the predictability of AI-generated code through structured prompts, version tracking, and output validation. It also enables teams to define coding conventions and ensure consistent AI behaviour across projects. This project showed how predictability-focused tooling can increase developer trust and make AI code generation a more reliable component of professional software development.

GitHub: Predictable-Secure-Code-Generation

Industry Partner: 
Netlight x Digital School Story


Problem: 
Digital School Story empowers students to create video content to deepen learning, but providing timely and personalised feedback at scale is a bottleneck. Manual feedback processes hinder the organisation’s ability to support a growing number of students and maintain educational quality. There is a need for an AI-based solution that can automatically evaluate student videos while complying with educational data privacy constraints. A user-friendly, maintainable, and privacy-first application would enable scalable feedback and support continued growth.

Solution: 
The students created a privacy-conscious, for nontechnical stakeholders, such as students, accessible, browserbased platform that uses AI models to generate personalised feedback on student-created educational videos. The application supports administrators in customising prompts and integrating feedback into the Digital School Story learning process. It ensures no persistent storage of student videos and adheres to strict data protection requirements. The project highlighted the feasibility of using AI to scale meaningful educational feedback while respecting privacy and resource constraints in a school context.

GitHub: Not available

Next Steps and Registration

Pre-Course Meeting

  • When: TBD (2026)
  • Where: Online via Microsoft Teams TBD (2026)


Pre-Course Meeting - Summary

TBA (2026)
 

 

Kickoff - Summary 

TBA (2026)

Intermediate presentation

Date: TBD (2026)

Final presentation

Date: TBD (2026)

Practical course  Digital Product Innovation and Development
Practical course  Digital Product Innovation and Development
Practical course  Digital Product Innovation and Development
Practical course  Digital Product Innovation and Development
Practical course  Digital Product Innovation and Development
Practical course  Digital Product Innovation and Development
Practical course  Digital Product Innovation and Development
Practical course  Digital Product Innovation and Development

Impressions

 Florian Angermeir

Your contact

Florian Angermeir

+49 89 3603522 279
angermeir@fortiss.org

2024 Challenges

Industry partner
Netlight / UNHCR


Problem: 
The united nations refugee agency protects the rights of millions of refugees worldwide and support emergency protection and assistance for people forced to flee. The current communication ways between the UNHCR and people of concern (POC) is labour intensive, lacks a clear visibility of status of individual cases and does not provide self-service possibilities to POCs. As a consequence, POCs lack trust in the process, feel increased insecurity and face issues in communicating with their points of contact at the UNHCR. 

Solution: 
The students worked on mobiles applications for iOS and Android to support POCs in approaching the UNHCR and communicating about their cases. The applications support over 20 languages and can even be operated by illiterate POCs. The application not only enables POCs to make their case in a self-service fashion, but also increases transparency in the process and for the case workers at UNHCR. These student's work successfully demonstrated the feasibility and value of mobile lightweight and accessible applications to the UNHCRs mission. 

GitHub:
UNHCR Mobile App

Industry partner
Siemens


Problem
Nowadays every modern industrial software development project employs automatic analysis of security properties. While this enables the identification of security flaws, their communication and response are still an open issue. The challenge consists of designing a system, that supports developers independent of their security expertise to quickly identify and implement solutions for detected security flaws. 

Solution
Students developed a comprehensive security findings recommender system. The LLM-based system automatically analyses security findings and guides developers with a concise as well as a detailed explanation in the resolution of the security flaw. 

GitHub
Security Findings Recommender System

Industry partner
Itestra


Problem
Business systems are on of the daily drivers of enterprises. As such a bad system performance not only impacts employee satisfaction, but also business goals. A common cause of bad system performance is ill-conceived implementations, such as blocking API calls within loops. While it is easy to avoid them during implementation, once implemented their effective and efficient detection requires tremendous effort. 

Solution
Students implemented an extensible plug-in for Intellij to detect performance anti-patterns in java code through dynamic analysis and abstract syntax trees. The plugin focused on the performance anti-pattern of many database requests inside a loop, but can be extended to the other performance anti-patterns. 

GitHub
Anti-Pattern Analysis

Industry partner
Siemens


Problem
Security compliance heavily relies on scarce security expertise and by that hinders fast development. Compliance utilities are not streamlined with modern software development hindering integration of compliance into software engineering workflows. The challenge is characterised by bringing security compliance closer to engineers and facilitate assessments by non-security experts. 

Solution
Students designed and implemented a website providing an overview of the software artefacts necessary for compliance to IEC 62443-4-1. This enables engineers to easily access compliance utilities and get an understand of compliance as well as to preliminary assess their compliance posture without consulting a security expert. 

GitHub:
Security Compliance Assessment

Industry partner
Netlight / Karevo


Problem
Sorting potatoes is a tedious manual task, especially for small and medium-sized farms, as automated systems are costly and tailored to large-scale operation. Karevo addresses this by developing an affordable AI-driven potato3 sorting system. One important step aspect of such a system is the clear communication of configuration options and sorting decisions, accommodating farmer with non-technical background. 

Solution
The students developed a web framework enabling the configuration of the AI driven decision making, giving farmers insights into the configuration options and respective decisions. 

GitHub
Potato Evaluation Framework

Industry partner
Itestra


Problem
Staffing personnel to projects is a complex task involving various aspects such as prevalent workloads, available skill set, or employee preferences. Hence especially fast growing companies face trouble scaling their staffing approaches, leading to intransparent and inconsistent decisions, risking inefficiencies and dissatisfaction inside the company. 

Solution
Students engineered a platform to facilitate the staffing process. The platform introduces visibility into the individual employee's workloads, skill set and preferences as well as wishes for future projects. The platform not only enables an efficient and effective staffing process, but also to allows employees to improve their skills sustainably in new projects. 

GitHub
Project Staffing Plattform

Partner

[Translate to English:] itestra Logo
Brivalo Logo
[Translate to English:] Siemens Logo
netlight Logo
Blekinge Tekniska Högskola Logo