Database Design & Development

Management

There is no doubt that development projects need careful management. You need someone that has lots of experience managing development projects.

There will frequently be conflicting requirements:

• It is important to have a Specification. However if you spend too long writing a detailed Specification other factors can have changed to make it out of date.

• Therefore there must be some flexibility to adapt to changes in the requirements. However if the requirements change too often both costs and time-scale can be adversely affected.

Our approach is to have lots of small stages, with each stage having a defined output, managed using standard project management procedures chosen for the scale of the project.

By using Rapid Application Development techniques and deploying the developing application on our own servers, the customer can see progress on a regular basis.

Change control

Change requests during the life of a development project are inevitable. They must be carefully managed to minimize the impact on the project. Our experience is that requests for changes should be logged but only implemented at the end of each stage, with a cost/time-scale impact assessment if changes exceed the original brief. This keeps the customer in control of the costs.

Development tool kit

In addition to the experience gained from working on a number of database projects, we now have a tool-kit of well tested functions that we can re-use when developing a new application.

Our database tool-kit also allows us to provide a prototype of a new application in a very short time, as well as to keep the overall costs down and give a rapid time to market.

Technology

The technologies employed depends on the synergies with the customer's existing arrangements.

Our database experience encompasses MS SQL Server, Informix, PostgreSQL and MySQL.

The possibility of employing Open Source database offerings and the considerable cost savings available should be considered when commissioning a new project. Our experience implementing and supporting PostgreSQL and MySQL based applications can help you decide.

Other considerations relate to how your application will be used - with a Web browser as the client application as with E-Commerce applications, or a dedicated client application that can provided a quicker and smoother operator experience.

However the use of Ajax techniques does help to improve the Web browser based solution.