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What affected the internal design?: Methodology

The design problems in phase I were not caused by an initial lack of design but arose through a lack of experience with prototyping and fourth generation development tools (00564, 00426, 00751). An outline design was produced before starting the prototyping which included an entity model, content of screens and a summary of processing (0046, 00026). However during prototyping the focus was on the screen design and associated processing and the system was designed by directly coding in Powerbuilder (00938, 00373). The database design grew from the original entity model in an ad hoc way with people just adding fields to existing tables (00269, 00751). The resulting database did not exploit the relational capabilities of Sybase (00751, 00269) and constrained future development (00767) making the system more difficult to maintain (00375). There were also problems with the software design although these were less acknolwledged (00127). The system grew rather than having a modular design (00564) and did not handle validation and errors in a standard way although visually it was generally consistent (00374). Within phase I the design was not revisited until it was too late to do anything about it (00635, 00767).

Social influence:
Technical influence:
Tasks: Software implementation

Commentary
Social influence
Technical influence

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© Clare Tagg 2000