Skip to main content

Application Designing-Requirements to Prototypes

Application design is one of the most critical part of software design..it it’s right the road ahead is a cakewalk…if not…Nightmare begins.

Here I am starting a series of posts that will explore the application design processes and tools in detail

Prior to application design, Requirement gathering constitutes the basic framework on which design is built. The requirements need to be analyzed from 4 perspectives to make valid requirements docs. The figure below sums up these perspectives

 

Here QoS is Quality of Service that also needs to be considered.

Use cases also are a means of defining the requirements and sometimes serve as the main basis for application design; however there are some basic differences.

 

Use Cases versus Requirements

A use case is a Unified Modeling Language (UML) model meant to describe a set of user steps that accomplish a task.

Requirements define what must be created to satisfy the needs of the user. Together, they provide a good view of how the user sees the system.

One the requirements are finalized, the Prototype validates the requirements that can be a POC or Mockups.

Mockups and Proof-of-Concept Prototypes

A mockup is meant to verify the requirements and use cases through the creation of a number of key screens in the system. Mockups are also called horizontal prototypes because they take a single, horizontal picture of the application. They do not go deeply (or vertically) into the other layers of the application such as the business objects and the database layers. Mockups are a great way to determine whether the requirements are complete and understood. They also help validate the use cases, the navigational structure, and some of the logical interactions of the application.

Mockups shortcomings

 They do not help to prove any of the architecture concepts for the system. They also do not validate the technology decisions.

Mockups Advantages:

 Mockups are useful for defining how the application will look and behave. This removes ambiguity from the implementation and builds early consensus on what will be delivered.

A proof-of-concept prototype is meant to validate the requirements and confirm the technology recommendations and high-level design. A proof-of-concept prototype is also called a vertical prototype because it looks at the application across the entire stack (UI, services, business objects, and database). Proof-of-concept prototypes have also been called reference architectures because they provide a reference for the development team on just how the system should work from top to bottom. This removes ambiguity, creates a standard, and eliminates a lot of risk.

Proof-of-concept prototype is generally, created by choosing a key requirement of the application and then building it out through each layer of the design. It makes more sense to prove out a riskier requirement than to work with a well-known requirement.

After going through the above exercises, the main work of design begins, as summarized below.

 

As the above figure depicts the first design phase is to develop Logical Model. All these designing phases make use of certain diagramming techniques ranging from ORM diagrams to Sequence and collaboration Diagrams.

These Diagrams will be covered in next post, which will explain all the used diagrams in detail.

Hope this was helpful..

Till Next we Connect….

Happy Learning.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Asp.Net 4.0: An Overview-Part-III

This is the last post in the series which will explore the following new features of ASP.Net 4.0  Performance Monitoring for Individual Applications in a Single Worker Process Web.config File Refactoring Permanently Redirecting a Page Expanding the Range of Allowable URLs Performance Monitoring for Individual Applications in a Single Worker Process It is a common practice to host multiple ASP.NET applications in a single worker process, In order to increase the number of Web sites that can be hosted on a single server. This practice results in difficulties for server administrators to identify an individual application that is experiencing problems. ASP.NET 4 introduces new resource-monitoring functionality introduced by the CLR. To enable this functionality, following XML configuration snippet is added to the aspnet.config configuration file.(This file is located in the directory where the .NET Framework is installed ) <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8...

Covariance and Contravariance-General Discussion

If you have just started the exploration of .Net Framework 4.0, two terms namely Covariance and Contravariance might have been heard. The concept that these terms encapsulate are used by most developer almost daily, however there has never been any botheration about the terminologies. Now, what actually these terms mean and how are these going to affect us as a developer, if we dive in to the details. The simple answer is it’s always good to know your tools before actually using them. Enough philosophy, let’s get to the business. Starting the discussion let me reiterate that in addition to Covariance and Contravariance, there is another terminology, Invariance. I’ll by start here by diving into the details of Invariance and then proceed further. Invariance: Invariance can be better understood by considering the types in .Net.>net has basically two type, value-types and reference-types. Value types (int, double etc) are invariant i.e. the types can’t be interchanged either ...

WCF-REST Services-Part-I

What is REST? REST stands for Representational State Transfer. REST as described in MSDN, “is an architectural style that can be used to build software in which clients (user agents) can make requests of services (endpoints)”. REST is one way to implement a client-server architectural style. A service that uses the architectural style of REST is generally referred to as a RESTful service or endpoint. RESTful endpoint Building Blocks 1. Resources(What resources would the service Serve/Offer) 2. URI(Identifiers used to represent the resources) 3. HTTP Verbs (What parts of the uniform interface (HTTP verbs) are each URI going to support, like Get/Post etc.) I’ll develop a hypothetical system that will make use of these blocks in the next article, let us consider the theoretical aspects of the REST in this post. Why REST? As explained above, REST internally implements a Client/Server model that can be easily achieved by using SOAP with ASMX or WCF. Just for the discussion sake ...