standard project structure

• Stage 1: Ideas generation and brainstorming
  This would comprise one or more interactive sessions with project stakeholders allowing the project’s business requirements to be defined, and suggest ways in which these may be enhanced to offer the optimum level of flexibility and usability in the finished product. 
   
• Stage 2: Formalisation of requirements and scoping
  Based on the outcome of the Idea Generation and Brainstorming exercise (Stage 1), the project requirements are refined and detailed to ensure that they have been correctly understood. At this point, it would also become possible to fully scope the scale of the project and hence advise on expected budgets and timescales for the project specification and implementation. 
   
• Stage 3: System prototyping/Wire-framing
  Expected to run in conjunction with the Formalisation of Requirements and Scoping (Stage 2), a prototype system would be built demonstrating the key features identified during Idea Generation and Brainstorming (Stage 1). It is felt that the creation of a system prototype would be vital in allowing all parties to understand how the final system should function, through a hands-on, real-life example. In addition, the development team would have the opportunity to conduct a comprehensive research and development exercise relating to the system structure and design required to complete the production system.
   
• Stage 4: Functional Specification
  The preparation of a Functional Specification ensures that the required project deliverables are clearly understood by both the development team and the project stakeholders. In addition, completion of the formal specification allows the preparation of very accurate cost information for the project build and implementation. The specification document would be based on the outcome of the Formalisation of Requirements and Scoping (Stage 2) and System Prototyping (Stage 3) exercises.
  Importantly, the Functional Specification exercise would comprise a “feature costing” process. Feature costing allows all parties to evaluate the relative merit of proposed features on the strength of the value add they would provide to the production system, verses the relative cost of implementation. The use of feature costing in the past has proved an excellent process by which project costs may be sensibly managed.
   
• Stage 5: Production
  The production process is typically addressed as a single exercise but does in fact comprise three very important and distinct parts: 

1. Engineering Requirements Specification (ERS) - before commencing the production build, an ERS would be produced in line with standard development procedure at bit10 ltd. Designed as a ‘development blueprint’ for the development team, the ERS would detail the engineering approach to be followed in the implementation of the production system. Of particular importance would be detailed information about the proposed application architecture along with design methodologies to be adopted.
2. Production build and implementation - this process would see the development team implement and build the final solution. The exact nature of the solution depends upon the requirements documented in the Functional Specification (Stage 4) and the methodologies and design detailed in the ERS. The finished product would be fully compliant with the design requirements of the project specification and would draw heavily on techniques developed during the System Prototyping (Stage 3).
3. Production testing, refinement and QA - before the final solution is released it must undergo rigorous internal testing by the development team, an internal QA department, and the client. During this process, final system refinement is completed to ensure compliance with the Functional Specification and the ERS. Once this process is complete, the system is formally deployed into a staging environment for final acceptance testing.
   
   It should be noted that the ERS document is typically an internal document for use by the bit10 ltd. development team. 

• Stage 6: User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and sign-off
  As described above, the UAT process would allow the client to perform a final series of acceptance tests on the production system to satisfy themselves that the delivered system is fully compliant with the requirements detailed in the Functional Specification. It should be noted that for the UAT process to be successful (and ensure a smooth and error-free deployment), the hosting environment in which it is completed must be identical to the target production environment. Following successful UAT the client would be expected to sign-off the system production as complete.
   
• Stage 7: Deployment
  bit10 would liaise with the service provider responsible for hosting and maintaining the production system to deploy the production system on to the live hosting environment. The complexity of the deployment process may be considerably reduced by the provision of adequate documentation on the live hosting environment from the service provider prior to work commencing on the system ERS.
  In addition, bit10 can offer fully managed application hosting facilities in-house.