Chapter 8 - Starting the Solution by Harvinder Singh

  Chapter 8

Starting the Solution

We are transferring from an abstract global to the physical international, from policy to technology, from problem to solution; from purpose to design: we have reached the closing quadrant of the Brown Cow Model, in which will be determined how we are going to enforce the essential business. With a solid know-how of the essence of the business, which means that the real trouble to be solved, it’s time to determine which components of that problem would advantage from being automated. The commercial enterprise analyst juggles many factors to determine the most appropriate product to build.

Iterative Development

Iterative development is a way of breaking down the software improvement of a large application into smaller chunks. In iterative development, feature code is designed, developed and examined in repeated cycles. With each iteration, additional functions may be designed, advanced and examined till there is a completely useful software program application prepared to be deployed to customers. In any event, it is usually more efficient to begin the discovery of need with abstract models and conversations instead of concrete implementations. No matter how you are developing software, the critical part of this process is the discovery, by both you and your stakeholders, of the real needs of the solution.

Designing the User Experience:

Designing the whole of the user experience is the best way to come up with a product that makes people want to buy it and/or use it. Experience design is a significant topic and one that we consider to be beyond the scope of this book. However, we briefly mention it here because this kind of design is beginning to play a larger part in our development activities. Experience design aims to produce a usage experience that is pleasing and exciting, as well as relevant to the culture and aspirations of the user. Such design focuses much more on how the product makes the user feel than on adding functionality to the product.

Innovation:

Innovation, as we use the term here, means thinking differently about the problem to find a new and better way to do the work, or in some cases to find better work to do. Instead of rushing ahead with the first-to-mind solution or the obvious solution, we urge you to spend just a little time with fellow business analysts and other stakeholders to come up with something better, something that will be longer lasting and more appealing, something innovative.

Essential Business

Before starting on a solution, we will have to collect a good chunk of the functional needs and a significant portion of the non-functional needs for the work that you have been studying. The purposeful needs can be supplied to you in the form of an enterprise use case (BUC) scenario, a group of atomic functional requirements, or properly crafted consumer stories. The non-purposeful requirements ought to be taken under consideration while making selections about the solution.

Consider the Users

Whatever it is that you intend to build, someone has to use it. If you want to sell your solution, or if you need people to start using it voluntarily, then it stands to reason that you will want to make the product attractive to its intended audience. You know the functionality, but now you have to make it fit seamlessly into the users’ expectations, or their perceptions of how it should behave. Of course, you cannot design something that will satisfy people if you don’t know those people or understand how they behave.

Personas are used when you have a large number of in-house users, or a large number of customers who will be using the product. Personas are constructed from data collected through surveys of your target audience and so represent most of your eventual users. We urge you to use both observations of real users, or personas. Whatever you do, you must construct a product that is appropriate and well matched to almost all of your users.