Planning & Elaboration
The planning and elaboration stages lay the foundation of the project. During initial planning and subsequent elaboration, we work with you to document your requirements and determine the technology solutions that will meet your needs.
We also document the details of the solution's design and features, and establish the collaborative and strategic relationship that will be maintained throughout the project.
Integral to planning and elaboration are:
Client Involvement
Your staff are essential members of the development team. Included in all phases of development, your staff provides feedback and sign-off at each of the many critical points in the process. This continual input ensures that the project remains on target—without the expense of rework and redesign.
Requirements
Requirements lay the foundation for development. The Forge requirements process is fundamental to the success of your project by enabling:
- A strategic partnership between Forge and your team
- An accurate timeline and budget
- Well-documented requirements and prioritization of features
- An efficiently developed application with minimal rework
Documentation
Throughout the process, Forge supports the full spectrum of development with documentation. Accurate and effective documentation communicates your solution’s requirements and processes to both the project stakeholders and the Forge project team. Most important, the requirements documentation provides all members of the team with a clear and unambiguous blueprint for development and management of the project.
Iterative Process
Forge CAD projects advance through a series of iterations, or mini-releases, with the features most important to you developed in earlier iterations.
Each iteration is a checkpoint to ensure that every feature meets or exceeds your needs and expectations. Working together as strategic partners, discrepancies are quickly identified and resolved early in the development process, eliminating surprises that may hinder implementation.
Iterations include refinement, development, and testing phases. At the conclusion of each iteration, we demonstrate project features to you to verify that the delivered functionality aligns with your precise requirements.
Our iterative process provides the opportunity for small pieces of the solution to be developed and presented to you at regular intervals, which lets you see and feel the developing CAD system.
Following your review and feedback on each iteration, our team completes any necessary modifications and begins the next iterative cycle. These cycles continue until the project is complete and ready for final testing.
The entire iterative process is supported by detailed documentation and your input.
Continual Quality Assurance
The features released in each iteration are tested and reviewed by the Forge quality-assurance team for consistency and usability, and to ensure that your Forge CAD system rigorously adheres to industry standards and your requirements. Larger scale integration tests are performed as more features are developed.
Starting in the requirements phase and continuing throughout the iterative development cycles until your CAD system is delivered, this approach ensures that issues affecting the success of the project are identified early in the process.
This approach also greatly reduces the chances that issues might adversely affect the project schedule and budget. Most important, it ensures that the application will meet, if not exceed, your expectations.
Change Management
Change management is the process of tracking and recording requests for changes to the project scope or deliverables. Changes are controlled and maintained using a Change Control Form (CCF) and an issue reporting tool.
Changes can be requested by the client or the Forge project team as the result of design meetings, informal project demonstrations, scheduled tests, quality reviews, or technical hurdles encountered during development.
Delivery & Implementation
Once final testing is complete, the Forge team deploys the solution in the client’s environment and manages any necessary integration.
Upon completion of each iteration and the fulfillment of all requirements, the final phase of the project lifecycle is the delivery of the completed solution.
At the end of the project, the following activities will have occurred:
- Final client demo
- Environmental confirmation
- User acceptance testing
- Training and documentation
