A practical example of a software factory: building a custom application for analysing EU Cyber Physical System (CPS) projects using Open Source software components

This paper is a retrospective analysis describing the development of a custom tool to organise data snippets derived from a substantial body of information, and a summary of the insights that this means of analysis provided in a very short time scale. The creation of data driven visualisations are of particular interest as they uncovered more cross-domain aspects of Cyber-Physical Systems projects than expert opinion had anticipated. These findings will be discussed fully in a second paper. The focus here is the development of the "Vulture" data scavenging tool using Open Source software as system components to create a custom application to serve the data collection and analysis requirements of a REA (Rapid Evidence Assessment) work-package within an EU funded project, Road2CPS.