Creating your MySQL Database: Practical Design Tips and Techniques

Document Gathering

This step can be done before the interviews. The goal is to gather documents about this organization and start designing our questions for the interviews. Of course, a data model for car sales has some things in common with other sales systems, but there is a special culture about cars. Another set of documents will be collected during the interviews while we learn about the forms used by the interviewees.

General Reading

Here are some reading suggestions:

• Enterprise annual report
• Corporate goals statement
• President's speech
• Publicity material
• Bulletin board

I once learned a lot about information flow from a grocery store's bulletin board for the employees. There were small notes from management to employees explaining how to handle ...