Software development projects often get off to a good start - meetings take place with the clients, you begin gathering business requirements, you understand the technologies needed, you understand the client's vision, you've got a Technical Architect in place to lead the project's technical efforts, and you may even have a decent plan in place for the QA and Deployment phases of the project. But, has anyone begun discussions about what content is getting fed into the proposed system/solution? D-A-T-A - it's gotta be the most important, most misrepresented piece of any data centric software solution.And I don't mean the data transport layer. I'm talking about the raw data itself. What does the client intend to surface in the UI? Where does it need to be surfaced, how are the data related, and why? Is the data being generated by humans? If so, is there a solid plan in place to detect exceptions in the data that may cause major dilemmas in your application? What are the data requirements of the assets in terms of dimension, magnitude, quality, format, file size, and a slew of other attributes? Is the data feed normalized enough to provide the granularity needed in the various parts of the solution? How will the data be exposed to the application or solution? In what format can the solution ingest the data? If it's media data (better keep reading), is there infrastructure in place to properly move the data? What are the bandwidth expectations for the solution? How about the expected user population's bandwidth dealing with video, for instance? Are the data assets too large for the UI, and hence, you're robbing the UX with gobs of never surfaced pixels?
The list of questions can be mindboggling. It should be considered in the project plan.
About palexand
Technical Project Manager for IdentityMine, working on .Net Framework 3.0 based projects for 3+ years now. Paul has a Master in Business Adminstration, and a BS in Information Systems Mgmt.