Generic POC Application

Question

Hello,

When looking into new techniques, technologies or frameworks a company would test it through a process using a Proof of Concept (POC).

Question:

Does your company use a generic application which to apply the concept to, if so what is your application? examples are petshop, northwind, AdventureWorks, shop etc

Or does you company write a brand new POC domain for each concept?

Pesonal Side note: I would have thought the former would be of great advantage as you can just fork off a new branch to test a concept quickly, could you explain why your company thought it was good (or not) to have a generic app.

Thanks

EDIT

To me a POC should be carried out to see if a concept will improve/fix something in your existing applications.

Having a smaller generic application (which represents the complexity and the way all your systems are built) so you can investigate the impact/pros/cons of a concept quickly.

As if you were to create POC each time that could take time, IE I want to test data access, I could just alter the test generic app, then note the required changes and impacts on this style of application.

Answer 1

My quick summary would be "mostly not, but sometimes".

The reason we mostly don't choose a generic boilerplate for proof-of-concepts is that when doing a proof-of-concept you want to do something that's at least quite close to the problem you eventually want to solve, and in the end development problems tends to be much more individual than you expect (or would want..). So I find that the point of the proof-of-concept is to do a kind of trial run, and we tend to want that trial run to be as open-ended as possible.

This doesn't negate the advantage of generic apps when you know from before that you'll use a technology with where you need scaffolding (in our case typically Google App Engine or PhoneGap). But then I think the generic app should be a bare minimum of what's necessary to get up and running on a certain platform.

This might have something to do with me being somewhat skeptical to technologies that requires a lot of boilerplate to get going.