The Meeting

I was referred to my client through a collegue and found the guy, Mr. S, to be energetic and technically savvy. He's bidding a job porting a legacy desktop application to C# and .Net and needs architecture and design help. Right up my ally.

 We met over coffee and discussed the project with screen shots and two documents. The first of these was the SOW which was a simple paper indicating what deliverables were needed and the second was a set of requirements for upgrades to be included in the new code. My participation was expected to be initial proposal, designing at minimum the static model ie classes and to be on-call for consultation during the development.

 The best thing about this kit of material was the disk which included the existing application and a well documented programming manual. What to do first? There was no specification or complete list of requirements and without this we'd naturally forget somethings, imagine other things to be included and have no tracability for acceptance once the work was complete and he waited for signoff.

 Tracability is the part of the process where every feature and function of the application can be shown to trace back to a requirement or set of requirements. Without some document to show there were requirements there would be no tracability. And this would make it hard for the company to agree that they got what the were contracting for. The first thing to do was to tear apart the manual and create a set of requirements from it. How? (next blog entry)