Digital Twin Technology in the Software Industry: Applications, Opportunities and Challenges

This paper explores Digital Twin (DT) technology in the software industry, examining its use in software development, software engineering and generally how it finds uses in the industry at large.In other to gain insight on the digital twin technology, the keywords -digital twin, software development, software engineering and software industry were used to search in google search engine to reveal related articles in this area.Other related areas as the Product lifecycle and Application Lifecycle and how they are applied in the software development was studied.Other emerging technologies and how they synergize with the DT technologies was also studied.An Implementation Framework of the DT is designed.Consequently, digital twin applications, promises and challenges were extracted from the papers reviewed.The utilization of Digital Twin technology in software develop is overwhelming.It is further enhanced when it is used in combination with cutting edge technologies like Artificial Intelligence and IoTs, among others.Digital twins is a transformative approach which enables the monitoring and management of software systems through virtual replicas on real-time basis.Though DTs technologies have many advantages, the technology currently face shared challenges in parallel with AI and IoT technologies.Those include data standardization, data management, and data security, as well as barriers to its implementation and legacy system transformation.