Application Development
As with web development; application development requires a lot of planning, designing, coding and testing time. With this in mind, all our projects are assigned to a team that is made up of a project manager, a designer and a programmer. By spreading the project we're able to focus on the different areas of the project, individually, thus reducing any errors that may need correcting when the project gets to the testing stage.
When a new project is started, ASP immediately determines with the client the 'clarity of purpose' for the proposed project. We then define the 'purpose' of the project. By doing this we're able to get an understanding of what the client envisages the outcome to be, with a clear purpose that everyone understands and agrees to. This should be a clear, concise and measurable statement of the business outcomes that the project is intended to achieve. We then define the project 'objectives' and 'scope'. Without an understanding and agreement of the scope of a project, elements to the project that started off being concise 'creep' into being overweight, hence the term 'scope creep'.
Once this is achieved, the project is then focused on solely by the project team, with the project manager inter-liasing with the client. The team then define the project by 'features'. By doing this, we're able to answer questions eg: 'When will the database be optimised' and respond with an honest answer eg: 'between 1 day and 2 weeks'. That is of course we specified that a feature will take 2 weeks to complete. This thus enables us to track a project by features.
By defining and tracking a project by features, we're keeping things simple yet effective. This also enables the client and ASP to have the same idea as to what and when the outcome of the project should be.
Once completed, the project goes through a rigorous testing phase and then deployed.