Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the importance of a robust systems architecture for your application. With systems architecture defined, , you then went on to learn the right questions to ask of your client to determine, in plain English, their exact requirements.

Next we discussed how to take that information and translate it into justifiable technical decisions. This way, when your project goes live, you won't encounter nasty surprises.

How you present this information is largely up to you. A three- or four-page guide for your client's reference might be enough, or you may wish to incorporate it into your technical specification. The important thing is to do the planning now, well ahead of application development. Load testing later on will ensure that your theories are correct. Better to have slightly wrong predictions now than have no predictions at all.

In the next chapter, following the project management methodologies and design patterns covered so far, we'll use the toolkit components and knowledge acquired so far and put the sales force automation project together, at long last.