Development Process
|  home  |  services  |  clients  |  projects  |  resume  |  contact  |

                            
     Procedural - In theory, the system development would proceed as follows:          

• Conceptualize the system.
• Define hardware & software (system) functional requirements.
• Build and code the system.
• Verification.
• Deployment.

    Reality - In practice, however: 

• The people who conceptualize the system usually do not understand all of the details and implications.
• Lots of information like means, extremes, limits, speeds, flow rates, precise algorithms, numeric precision, resolutions and accuracies are nonexistent in the systems requirement document.
• Highly detailed plans are rarely followed.
• Requirements mutate as questions are asked and implications are exposed.
• Some stakeholders are left out of the loop until the end stages.
• Most projects (especially the successful ones) do not conform to the initial requirements.
• Most projects do not meet budget and time schedules.

    Evolutionary - A much more practical approach is: 

• Conceptualize the system.
• Define initial hardware & software (system) functional requirements.
• Iteratively proceed and adapt.
  • Modifying system requirements and design as capabilities, interactions and implications emerge.
• Verification.
• Deployment.

   Details - Try to adhere to the following tenants: 

• Enlist functional requirements from all stakeholders.
• Decompose functional requirements into a hierarchy of system requirements.
• Separate system requirements into hardware requirements and software requirements.
• Continually increase the granularity of  requirements.
• Transform hardware requirements into hardware specifications.
• Transform software requirements into software functionality.
• Establish regular communication among all stakeholders.
• Promote ongoing collaboration as the system evolves.
• Make well defined iterative advances and review and revise system requirements as necessary.
• Since the process is evolutionary, define success more in terms of value of the final system rather than in terms of meeting the initial requirements and time and cost schedules.