The success of any business depends on correct planning and implementation of proper business processes. Amplified Technologies develops dynamic software applications that automate business processes, and helps to put in order efficient communications between employees, partners and customers. We utilize the latest Microsoft development technologies to design custom, database-driven applications to meet your unique business requirements. If your needs are custom software application development, you can rely on the experienced staff of system analysts, architects and engineers at Amplified Technologies to meet even the most demanding project requirements. We have the knowledge and talent to produce low-cost and professional software development of custom application solutions using object-oriented analysis, database development and software engineering principles.
Our application development services cover the concept-to-market needs of the product and include product conceptualization, design, development, testing, and support. Our project life cycle is structured around the approach of User Centered Design. It has five distinct phases of development — Discovery, Definition, Design, Development, and Deployment — often called the “Five D’s”. By addressing the needs of the user in the early stages through user-centered design, we determine to change this outcome. Usability bugs and needless features are flushed out in these early stages, before the core development is commenced, therefore speeding up the process through to deployment.
Discovery
The first phase in your project is the planning and discovery phase. It is during this phase that our team spends a lot of time getting to know you and your business. We will need to determine:
- What are your marketing objectives for this project?
- Who is your audience and what are their expectations?
- What message are you trying to convey?
- What is the competitive landscape and what are the industry best practices?
Once we achieve a thorough understanding of your place in the market and your business needs, we will make tactical recommendations of how to best achieve your goals. As your marketing team, we will help you make strategic decisions about the course of the project and it will impact your overall marketing scheme.
Definition
Ineffective requirements definition and management is one of the most common reasons why IT organizations struggle to deliver projects on-time and on-budget. By one estimate, when development projects fail, about 70 percent of the time it’s because of insufficient, inaccurate or outdated requirements.
The requirements analysis should begin with business or organizational requirements and translate those into project requirements. If meeting stated requirements will be unreasonably costly, or take too long, the project requirements may have to be negotiated down, down-scoped or down-sized, in discussions with customers or sponsors.
Any discussion of requirements analysis methods will quickly become specific to the type of project effort. Many industry areas have specific, proven techniques for obtaining thorough and accurate definition of requirements. Sometimes it is useful to write a draft users manual as a way to define requirements. While the methods may differ, the principles remain the same across all types and sizes of projects. The requirements analysis should cover the whole scope of the project. It must be comprehensive and thorough. It must consider the views and needs of all the project stakeholders.
It is easy to leave scope out of a requirements analysis or to omit necessary clarity or detail thereby making the requirements definition ambiguous. The completed requirements analysis should be reviewed and approved by the customer or project sponsor before work continues. On large projects, the first formal design review is actually a requirements review and signoff.
To summarize the basic points:
- Examine the Business Need or Opportunity
- Write a Clear Statement of Project Objectives
- Know the Difference Between Wants and Needs
- Negotiate the Requirements Definition Interactively with the Customer
- Conduct a Thorough and Comprehensive Analysis
- Document the Results Unambiguously in Sufficient Detail
- Put the Requirements Document under Version Control
Design
The second phase in your project is the design phase. This is where the fun begins! Our designers take the inspiration you’ve provided them and come up with a concept for your review – keeping in mind usability, best design practices, and ease-of-use.
In the design phase the architecture is established. This phase starts with the requirement document delivered by the requirement phase and maps the requirements into an architecture. The architecture defines the components, their interfaces and behaviors. The deliverable design document is the architecture. The design document describes a plan to implement the requirements. This phase represents the “how” phase. Details on computer programming languages and environments, machines, packages, application architecture, distributed architecture layering, memory size, platform, algorithms, data structures, global type definitions, interfaces, and many other engineering details are established. The design may include the usage of existing components.
Designing the look and feel for your site is just one deliverable of this phase; there are other tasks that we will need to address before moving on:
- Determining the architecture of your site by developing a detailed site map.
- If there is any technical development, we will need to make sure that the design of the functionality meets all of our usability standards.
- User experience specialists create interface designs that ehance ease-of-use methodologies and structures keeping in tune with the architecture and identifying problem areas.
- Through the use of user focus groups varying in knowledge levels, we can modify and work through changes that futher strengthen the interface’s capability to engage users of all levels.
Now that we have decided on the look of your site and have identified all of the pages that will need to be constructed, we are ready to start constructing the site in our development phase.
Development
In the development and testing phase, customisations to the business system are developed and tested. This phase is divided into two stages: Construction and Product Testing. In the construction stage, the Senior Systems Architect ensures that all subsystems, modules, and components are coded and fully documented, and that identified discrepancies have been corrected. Once this is complete, in the product testing stage, we iron out the kinks and bugs to deliver a quality product in deployment. A customer satisfied with the quality of a product will remain loyal and wait for new functionality in the next version. Quality is a distinguishing attribute of a system indicating the degree of excellence.
Key activities include:
- Developing the software (e.g., modifications to tables, forms, processing routines, and interfaces)
- Implementing the business system (set-up of system settings and business rules)
- Creation of database structures to support data collection and manipulation.
- Integration of user interface design into back end application system.
- Source control and management.
- Documentation of key programming elements.
- Code review and product testing.
Deployment
The fifth and final phase of your project is the deployment phase. So your site has been built. When will this puppy go live?
Prior to going-live we will need to do the following:
- Thoroughly test, test, test to assure a flawless user experience
- Have our Quality Assurance department give the stamp of approval for meeting project requirements, usability and technical standards, and design excellence
- Determine a launch plan to promote your site (marketing collateral, ads, email blasts, etc.)
You are now ready to show your site to the rest of the world! Our team will submit your site to the appropriate search engines and if you would like we can begin a robust Search Engine Marketing Campaign that will help catapult your site to the top of the search engines.