The Software Design effort is a comprehensive software development methodology to collect and document the details of a custom software solution. It is intended to organize all the technical aspects of the solution and consists of the following deliverables:
See Software Development Expectations for more details
Black Line Engineers operate most effectively if provided with detailed specifications from which to code, solve and guide their development efforts. The software design process defines the details of the Client’s experience, business logic and overall expectations of the system being developed. The Software development process often has gray areas of requirements and decisions need to be made real-time and having a specification to work from dramatically increases the success.
The Software Design documentation is part of Black Line’s values of transparency, doing what we say and at the price we agreed to. Fixing the cost of the development effort provides appropriate accountability to maintain appropriate efficiencies. It is also essential to the planning, execution and successful management of the construction project
If servers, or server related, technologies are not available the modern organization cannot function. Regardless if the server technologies are on-premise, cloud-based or virtual. As the name implies, Server technologies “serve” data, features, secure, and organize the digital assets of an organization.
Missed expectations of a software solution, overlooked components, unexpected costs, over budget, underperformance of solution, quality issues, lack of solution transparency, incomplete deliverables
Similar to a blueprint for a home, building or other construction project having accurate expectations is critical for both the builder and the Client to measure success. Software development is simply the automation of business processes “thought up” by business people to solve business problems. The challenge is capturing business logic, convert logic into code, then verify and validate the problem was solved with automation.
By having a detailed specification to collect these requirements, how it will be built, what the business people will experience, the cost to build…the odds of success go up significantly. If during construction there are disagreements as to scope, the “blueprint” can be leveraged to negotiate a mutually agreeable solution.
Black Line balances the need for a detailed specification with the reality that not all business logic can be captured in a document. Typical business systems, especially those that are mature, have many nuances to them that would require more time/budget than a project has. Therefore, Black Line’s approach is to capture 80% of the functional and business rules during the design process and factor the other 20% into the construction effort. It also provides a vendor-agnostic design deliverables that can be used for communicating functionality, goals and objectives to other business leaders and stakeeholders.
This approach reduces the time frame of the design, allows the software development team to produce working aspects of the system quickly while addressing undocumented requirements on the fly. This method allows us to produce smaller (functionally viable) components of a system in a sequence that produces the final system in “stages”.
Black Line also provides the Business Leaders with options to implement aspects of a system to match the priorities of the business. For example, a proposed system may have 6 major components, of which, 4 are critical and 2 that are less important and can lag to subsequent versions/phases.
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We start with a conversation to deeply understand your wants and needs. Only by truly diving into discovery can we uncover the best solutions.
Let’s Talk >
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