Custom/Bespoke Application Development – Notes, Domino Applications

Notes, Domino Offshore/Outsourcing – Custom Development

Our typical custom development project has the following phases:

• Requirements Gathering – We debrief your business users, IS project managers about the functional, environmental requirements for your solution. This is done using brainstorming sessions, structured questionnaires and interactive prototyping sessions. Then we use standard modelling techniques like use-cases to transform the requirements into structured and prioritized elemental requirements. We assign unique IDs to each requirements to enable traceability of requirements into design, code and testing.
• Design – Once the requirements are signed off, our architect evolves an overall functional architecture and defines the interfaces of this custom solution with other Notes and non-Notes based applications in your infrastructure. The architecture also contains a high level modelling of components within the Notes application including files, internationalization consideration, security, scalability, shared resources. The architecture is then evolved into a detailed design document that outlines the forms, views, navigators, agents, applets, custom JSP tag libraries, web pages, external databases, file based resources and security schema.
• Coding – During the coding phase, the design is realized into code using Formula Language, LotusScript or Java and the developer plans unit tests to ensure that the code does what it is meant to do. Coding also sees best practices in naming, resource declaration and usage, performance optimization and maintainability of software being incorporated into the application.
• Testing – An independent testing team takes your Domino application and runs through a suite of tests derived from the Requirements stage. The results of the testing are recorded in a centrally maintained bug tracker and each bug is assigned a unique ID. The source of the bug is traced and all the associated bugs are fixed by the developer concerned. Regressive testing is done on an iterative basis till the application clears the benchmark standards to proceed to deployment.
• Deployment – Our project team deploys the application into your testing environment first to enable user acceptance testing. Any data conversion required is carried out and the users run the application through test cases derived from the requirements document. Any outstanding bugs (there will be few at this stage) are fixed immediately. Once the application clears end-user testing it is deployed on your live server and our team works with your administrators to set access controls, processes for monitoring application health, backup strategy etc. and hands the application over to your administrators

Custom applications for Lotus Notes covers:

• HR Applications – Leave Tracking, Expense Tracking, Employee Profile Database, Employee Discussion Forums, HR Forms Library, Self Service HR Requests etc.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – Domino is an ideal platform for building CRM applications given its ability to handle forms and workflow, email integration and full text search abilities.
• Knowledge Base – Domino, Lotus Instant Messaging (Sametime), Lotus Team Conferencing (Quickplace) and the Notes client offers the best platform for tapping the tacit and explicit knowledge of your employees. Integration with presence awareness, integration with email (the biggest source of unstructured knowledge) and ability to handle unstructured data in the .NSF file offers a great base for knowledge management applications.
• Intranet/Extranet – Forms based intranet applications like self-service requests, personal publishing, knowledge sharing and discussion databases are easily developed using Lotus Notes, Domino. Extranet applications including secure information publishing, help desks and vendor/customer support also make for good application candidates on Lotus Notes and Domino.