Making the Transition to the Transition Phase

At some point, you and your customer decide that it is time to begin the transition. Usually, that time is based on the expected delivery date for the system you are building minus some amount of time to prepare. By the end of the Construction phase, you have finished most work on the software and you now need to package and deliver it. And, if you kept your customer involved throughout the project, you have implemented the most important and valuable features. Your Transition phase might be long, in which case you make several deliveries of code and supporting material to the user , or it might be short, in which case you prepare the software for deployment and support relatively quickly. To maintain control over the project, we recommend that you plan a short Transition phase. We discuss that topic later in this chapter.