Plaant Life Cycle

Overview : How a new Plaant application is born

Strategies and techniques used for analysis and management of information systems projects widely vary among consulting companies. To outline how the Plaant application is carried to life, we used sort of ãcommon procedureÒ that is, in more or less sophisticated form, practiced across the world as a background. However, it should be mentioned that Plaant as a development platform is agnostic to and can be used with advantage under whatever method.

Consulting and analysis

Not surprisingly, the new Plaant development project beginns with analysis of requirements and needs of the customer. Usually consultant together with the customer's internal team carry out an analysis of internal corporate processes to be supported by the Plaant application. Usually as an output of analytical work some kind of the functional specifications document is created. It describes application work flow, case studies, user rules for the individual parts of a system and graphic representation of the application. After the signatures are attached to the document, the functional specifications become (or at least everyone agrees that it should become) the cornerstone reference for all parties involved.

Application prototype

Using the PlaantTools instrument the programmer or the consultant transforms the data structures and screen forms described in the functional specifications into the XML format. From now on it is possible to run the application and present it to the customer. In terms of project schedule, the customer may be presented with the system's basic functionality in a few days from final approval of functional specifications. If at this stage customer comes up with additional requirements, the changes can be implemented without any difficulties, even if major modifications of data structures are involved.

Creating functions, triggers and users' rules

The functional specifications are ready and the customer is happy with the prototype application. It is the right time for application developer to start his favorite Java IDE and using the Plaant components create the application logic. As needed the developer sets up the user roles and their rules for individual objects by means of Plaant Repository Commander.

Application deployment

As the last step before setting the system to test-run operations, the programmer deploys the complete application to server. In case any differences of data structures are found against the prototype, incremental upgrade will run automatically.

Next part : Development