This talk will give an introduction into SDAPS how it works and how it can be used automate surveys or even examinations on paper. In the core SDAPS is an optical mark recognition software that is integrated with LaTeX and LibreOffice. It provides all the utilities to automate simple surveys, including questionnaire creation, manual error correction, and a simple report generation module. Also important is its flexibility to be used for data acquisition by either exporting the data or even interfacing with SDAPS python API directly for specialized applications.
While the core of SDAPS is the optical mark recognition there is a lot more to creating a good utility. Both usability and technical aspects have to be taken into account to achieve the goal of a simple to use utility that is still flexible enough for more complex use cases. With a background for conducting anonymous survey a lot of the feature development to support different use cases was driven by suggestions from the community. Further changes and improvements are now on the way thanks to input from academic users using SDAPS both for surveys and examinations. Especially examinations pose a unique challange as there is a multitude of different ways to conduct these, making custom data processing and workflows necessary. All this poses new challenges to the development of SDAPS as the different requirements should be realized on top of a common core SDAPS code base either by extending SDAPS itself or allowing it to be extended using own code.