Chapter Six. Step 6: Application Prototyping


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Chapter Overview

This chapter covers the following topics:

  • Things to consider about prototyping

  • How prototyping can provide an effective way to validate application requirements

  • The concept of " time-boxing " prototyping activities

  • Best practices for prototyping

  • Prototyping considerations such as proper team structure, deadline management, scope and deliverables, and business participation

  • The purposes and implications of the six different types of prototypes : show-and-tell, mock-up, proof-of-concept, visual-design, demo, and operational

  • Guidelines for prototyping

  • An example of a skill survey used to determine the skill sets of the business people who will participate in the prototype and will later use the BI application

  • Brief descriptions of the activities involved in application prototyping, the deliverables resulting from those activities, and the roles involved

  • The risks of not performing Step 6

Things to Consider

Objectives

Are the objectives for this prototype clear?

Do we know what kind of prototype we want to build?

Have we developed a prototype in the past?

If we have, what was our experience? What lessons did we learn?

How will the business people benefit from prototyping this BI application?

How will the organization benefit?

Scope and Schedule

What is the scope of the prototype?

How will we manage scope changes?

How much time do we have for this prototype?

How many versions (iterations) of the prototype are we planning to create before starting real development work?

How will we time-box prototype activities? By version? By activity? By deliverable ?

Deliverables

Are the requirements clear about the prototype deliverables?

What reports do the business people expect from the BI application? Will we prototype all of those reports ? If not, which ones?

What queries will the business analysts write against the BI target databases? Which of these queries should we prototype?

Are any business analysts currently using spreadsheets to satisfy their query needs? Will the prototype include reports to replace all those spreadsheets?

What data do we need for the prototype database?

Will a BI application interface be required? If so, are we prototyping it? For how many business people? What do they have now?

Are we going to include a Web front end in the prototype?

Business Participation

Who will use the BI application? How many of those business people will be involved with the prototype?

Where are the business people located? How will they connect to the BI application? By local area network (LAN)? By wide area network (WAN)? Through the intranet?

Have we worked with these business people in the past?

What types of technical skills do they have? What technical skills are needed to participate in the prototype?

How much will they participate in this prototype? Hands-on, full-time involvement? Occasional demo reviews only?

Tools and Methods

What tools will we use to develop the prototype?

Will we use the same tools to develop the final BI application?

How will lessons learned be communicated to the extract/transform/load (ETL) team?

There is nothing business people like more than to see their requirements turn into a tangible deliverable they can "touch and feel" very quickly. A prototype accomplishes that goal.



Business Intelligence Roadmap
Business Intelligence Roadmap: The Complete Project Lifecycle for Decision-Support Applications
ISBN: 0201784203
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 202

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