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Division of IT: Application Services
Custom Application Development Process
Understand Your Requirements
A business technology analyst interviews you and your staff to ascertain your specific needs. Essentially, you describe in your own words your vision of what you want to accomplish using software. The result is a list of prioritized feature sets. We then produce a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to design the application. The MOU details each party's responsibilities as well as estimated hours and charges. Attached to the MOU are a project scope statement and the feature sets. Depending on the size of the project, there may be more than one design MOU.
Elaborate Feature Sets
After the design MOU is complete, we dig into the technical details. First, we organize a development team consisting of the project manager, team lead, a user interface specialist, a reports specialist, a technical writer, a business technology analyst, a database administrator, testers, and software developers. Second, they collectively analyze the feature sets and develop technical design artifacts such as a storyboard, prototype interface, and application architecture. When we have finished with the elaboration of the feature sets, you have a complete design from which any qualified developer can construct the application.
Construct the Application
If you want us to construct the application from the design created during the elaboration process, we jointly sign a construction MOU. Software developers write fully commented computer code and test and debug the code during development. Additionally, a separate group of testers runs the application through its paces.
Deploy the Application
Once the application has been fully tested by us, it's now time for the customer to try it out for approximately 60 days. We repair any bugs we may have missed. Additionally, the technical writer provides training and documentation. Finally, we deploy the application to web, application, and database servers and go live. When you are satisfied with your application, we jointly sign an acceptance document.
Maintain the Application
After deployment, we jointly sign a maintenance MOU. Maintenance includes repair of critical defects that make functionality unusable, repair of noncritical defects ("bugs") that minimally impact functionality, installation of security patches, changes in the underlying hardware and/or software, changes to foreign data stores, user interface improvements, and report development. The maintenance MOU does not cover the development of new functionality.
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