Developing System Specifications

Chapter 4, "Gathering and Analyzing Operational and Infrastructure Requirements," described the types of information you need to gather for a system and the resources you need before proceeding to the design phase. You also learned about a variety of documentation components that you can use to put together the pieces of the puzzle into specification proposals.

This chapter focuses on selecting appropriate mechanisms for the variety of elements in a system. The first element of this process is the development strategy, including a variety of features found in most applications. Methods for handling system elements can be quite diverse, and in most cases, the choices made for one system or application are quite different in other systems or even other applications within the same system.

In analyzing system characteristics, you need to make decisions about dividing the project into layers, often referred to as tiers. You also need to determine whether the system is going to use thin clients or rich clients, middle-tier rules applications, data management applications, and the role of the database storage. Each decision affects the system, how it is deployed, how it is to operate day-to-day, and maintenance and upgrade issues.