In our initial consultation, we will review and discuss your needs and expectations in order to determine which languages and processes will best serve your needs and integrate with your existing software and applications. A conceptual framework will be agreed upon and continued interaction during the development will insure that there will be no need to start over in order to incorporate new needs that become evident as we move through the various developmental steps.

A Lead Developer, Project Manager and Customer Liaison will be assigned to guide your project through its stages, and you will be kept updated on our progress along the path. After deployment, Web Support Tech can be retained to offer ongoing support and maintenance.

Using Best Practices as a guide, certain methodologies are followed in building Applications and other Desktop or Web based programs.

In situations where the complete project requirements can be gathered and analyzed before starting design and development Web Support Tech typically employs a sequential development process. This incorporates a planned approach following a proscribed set of events: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Testing, Deployment and Maintenance commonly referred to as the Waterfall method because each stage of the process flows seamlessly to the next. The benefit of this approach is that it avoids costly changes “downstream”, with each step checked and perfected before proceeding to the next.

That said…there are problems inherent in strictly adhering to the Waterfall approach. Web Tech Support realizes that it is impossible for you (or us) to know what requirements may change or what additional elements you may find desirable but did not foresee at the time of the initial design process. In some projects, based on your budget, we will be able to Implement design changes and revise the structure during the process, in others, your budgetary constraints will keep us fixed on the original plan but we will adapt the blueprint to insure the Application works as promised.

Properly blueprinting a project often means a great deal of time is spent in the up-front planning and design stage, assuring that when the development coding begins, there is a clear and cohesive set of requirements defined, and a set of directions to be followed, in order to meet them. As your team and ours review all of the elements in the design collaboratively, we develop a theoretical prototype that enables us to search for potential risks that can be eliminated and pitfalls that can be avoided. A new course can be charted and a new blueprint created before Coding/Programming gets underway.

As you watch the development in progress, we hope to stay on course and on time, but realize that sometimes the Chaos Theory (a sophisticated version of Murphy’s Law) often comes into play, so we always maintain and plan for a degree of design flexibility. Regardless of budgets, if during implementation and testing we discover unexpected functionality issues, we know that it is better to revise a design than to try to work around a faulty design. It is often said best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry (a literary version of Murphy’s Law)… so, as the client you too must remain flexible as milestones in the timing of the project can also be adversely be affected by unexpected problems or design changes during the Development and Coding process.

Combining different aspects of established methodologies and maintaining flexibility ultimately leads to a user friendly adaptable and scalable product.

Waterfall: A linear framework. Following strict guidelines, this methodology is best employed when all aspects of a project are clearly defined in advance and not likely to change during implementation.

Prototyping: An iterative framework. This methodology, best employed when there is a high degree of user interactivity involved in the application. The process breaks the larger project into smaller parts thereby enabling you and other end users to try them and provide feedback to the Development team. In its best form it is an evolutionary process and the prototype is often quite different from the final product due to resulting modifications made during the process.

Other forms of Prototyping include Rapid Prototyping, which gives a quick look at how the program as a whole may look and feel, but is then discarded and the project begun with the lessons learned from the prototype. This is a more costly methodology but does provide you with an opportunity to make changes to your design at a stage that is less costly than a total rewrite further along the process.

Incremental: A combination of linear and iterative framework methodologies in which the project is created in increments, and the increments are tested by end users, and the test results dictate the next step in the process, building upon lessons learned in prior iterations.

Spiral: Incorporates features of Waterfall and Prototype methodologies and is chosen for larger, more complicated and more expensive projects that call for a number of prototypes to be built over a longer period of time. Each prototype is tested and features are either added or abandoned as a result of thorough analysis and user feedback.

Rapid Application Development (RAD): – Iterative framework type that relies less on formal planning and more on a series of quickly written prototypes. This methodology is popular because it affords the greatest flexibility in projects that are going to be filled with changing client requirements. The use of preexisting software modules is also common in RAD programming as it reduces the expense and speeds the process. With the ever-changing makeup of Web 2.0 projects, RAD affords a quick solution that, due to the nature of the constant changing landscape, is not always intended to be a long lasting application.

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