Design & Estimation
Design of an application is crucial for accurate estimation of the overall effort. Needless to say, the effort estimation plays an important role in project sizing, project planning and resource management. Unfortunately, in most instances, the application designers do not participate in the project planning stage.
We offer design and estimation advice for new bespoke application development projects, which are highly critical at inception and in ensuring solution delivery. Technical development, testing and support skills often prove inadequate for application design. However specialist application design skills are of limited use on an on-going basis and expensive fixed overhead costs. Our service, narrowly defined, provides this specialist support to enterprises, embarking on new bespoke development projects, providing independent design and estimation.
An enterprise class application consists of three important elements: setting up parameters, storing master data and marshaling transactional data through processes. In addition, there are batch processes and report generation needs. These aspect need to be juxtaposed with the technical architecture as well as the non-functional requirements such as security, scalability, as so on. This allows the designer to map each functional requirement with different tiers of the technical architecture. There are two deliverables at this juncture: the overall effort estimate and an input to low level design document.
What we do:
- Validate functional and non-functional specification documents
- Understand the domain and create logical architecture
- Create placeholders for modular break-up
- Create a high level design document for both – business logic as well as the database
- Provide inputs to low level design as well as to estimation
How we do it:
- Create a list of actors, data entities and processes
- Create coarse-grained use cases
- Identify interchange of data entities through different modules
- Create a common information model
- Classify data entities as reference and transactional data
- Provide inputs to map the above to technical components
- Use work break-down method to estimate the effort for overall design and development
We offer additional services from WhiteBox Business Solutions, which are often included in our engagement scope to enable provision of further support and supervision, in managing the delivery of the desired outcomes.
