An Experience of Continuous Development - Formulating Requirements Concurrently with System Implementation

摘要

Project development time has been far shortened due to keen competition and fast going business. Short allowed development time is a great challenge to software engineers. Very often, clients only have a very vague idea about the functions the system should provide. Due to time constraint, the system requirements are formulated and specified in parallel with the system implementation. In some cases, the system requirements are developed and revised continuously concurrently with the system implementation. We call software system development of this kind Continuous Development. Most software engineering methods need well specified requirements before the system analysis and design phrases can begin. However in continuous development, this condition is unsatisfiable as the requirements have not yet formulated, not to say being specified. Our development of Web Content Search Engine and Web Content Management System for the Hong Kong Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) is a project of this kind. The time allowed for the project was only five months. By making use of some strategies namely highly parallelized processes, domain ontological model, client participation, incremental development and duplication of effort, we succeed in completing the project on time. In this paper, we discuss our approach in tackling the challenge and our experience learned from this project.