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Page 1 of 4 When BNT Solutions was incorporated in 2001 there was one goal in particular that ran as a thread through everything that was done: simplify, simplify, simplify! Of course there are some things that, even though you try to keep them as simple as possible, are still going to be somewhat complicated. In these cases, the only solution is to Hold Hands with the customer as We Walk Through the Project Together. Towards that end, many documents were written and prepared over the years that try to help the customer to understand the How and Why of success in various areas.
The Software Development Cycle is one of those documents. The on-time and on-budget delivery of a successful software project is not difficult to achieve but it's never an accident. The only way to build a software system successfully is to work together, taking all the necessary steps while following a solid and reliable process.
This article is a big-picture overview of the Software Development Cycle as followed at BNT Solutions, Inc.
BNT Solutions follows industry best practices to ensure the
on-time and on-budget delivery of your solution. We are confident that you will
find our business process to be simple and easy to follow. Most importantly: it
ensures that you are fully in control of your project and that you are able to
verify at regular intervals that the project is moving forward smoothly. Our
simple Software Development Cycle (SDC) provides you with regular opportunities
to verify that the project is meeting your real needs. In addition, we provide
you with powerful tools with which you can control the work to be done and
establish realistic cost estimates for any changes you desire
- before each cycle begins and, to a lesser extent, during the development phase within a cycle.
The
SDC is designed to ensure that the two main objectives of all Software
Engineering processes are fully met:
- Together, we will Build the Right Software,
ie: make sure that the software being built is actually going to meet the real
needs of the people who are going to use it, and
- Together, we will Build the Software Right,
ie: make sure that the software actually works as expected.
This is
accomplished through the use of many short development cycles, each one
consisting of four distinct phases: Evaluation, Design, Implementation and
Testing. By keeping the cycles short, we can release early and often - the key to
ensuring that our project meets the real and immediate needs of the end-users.
Let's take a quick look at each phase in the SDC:
Evaluation
Before starting our project, we prepared a roadmap showing where we wanted the project to go and how we wanted to get there. As such, the first development cycle doesn't include much of an evaluation. Still, it’s always a good idea to review the work that is planned for the future to see if there is anything we can do better. Subsequent cycles will also benefit from anything that was learned in the previous cycle. The results of our evaluation will be used to update the roadmap.
The main purpose of this phase is to reduce costs and avoid
problems. There are often many ways to complete a task. We want to review all
our tasks, prioritize them, evaluate risk and find the simplest and easiest way of moving forward with each of part of the system.
Improvements in the plan that are made in this phase might dramatically reduce costs throughout the project. If we find a simpler way of getting something done in this step, we will have
saved the cost of the more complicated steps that we avoided. If we find a
problem with our existing plan and correct it before the work begins, we will
have saved the cost of implementing the buggy code, testing and correcting it.
This can add up to a significant time and cost savings for each cycle and the
overall project.
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