Table of Contents

1. General Development Methodogy
2. Links to Other Documents

1. General Development Methodogy

I've learned the hard way that in the website business, you have to have a stepwise refinement methodology, rather than trying to design and communicate everything up front before the customer has seen anything. If you try to do the whole design before you do any of the programming, you often don't get the best design, and even if you did, the customer can't understand what you are talking about. And you can blow a huge amount of time on meetings, without any return. Therefore I have forced myself to follow a pretty strict methodolgy:

Stage 1. Exploratory discussions on the phone (free)
 Stage 2. Agreement to build a simple prototype (nominal cost)
 Stage 3. Improvement of Prototype (paid on hourly basis)

Once there is a prototype, we just keep improving it, and billing hourly. The customer can continue this process as long as he can see he's getting value for the money.

With this methodology, the customer has to first of all decide that they have enough faith in Bluesoft to spend money on a prototype. The charge for building the prototype is minimal.

Once the prototype exists, then the customer has the option of continuing or not. Any subsequent work is done item by item and is billed on an hourly basis. The customer raises a problem, and I design and implement what I think is a solution to that problem.

A typical case was a membership system I developed. Stage 1 was that after some discussion, I developed an initial prototype that I though would do the job. The customer decided that the prototype was promising enough to spend some money on it, so we agreed on an overall scope, and then I started processing requests for work. For each issue, I would design and implement what I thought was the best solution, and then explain or demonstrate it to the customer. This process continued for 3 months, with the customer inputting data as we went along.

2. Links to Other Documents