Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

13.5. Summary

A little effort can go a very long way in ensuring that the project team has everything it needs to implement the system. This chapter started with a fairly straightforward application. However, you saw that even a simple system offers many functional and technical design choices and decision points. A simple design choice can have far reaching affects. You should model the suggested processing to get a true picture of what it really means. You saw this in the later use cases and the effect it can have on the overall system. It is important to know where to draw the line to ensure that the scope of the application is set appropriately. The design elements discussed in this chapter help to set a very clear scope. The case study doesn't include all the features that you might expect to find on a full-blown membership system. However, as I mentioned at the start, the book is not about teaching you how to implement a good membership system. It is about implementing a good solution to any given problem. Ensuring that you have a very clear vision for moving forward is paramount to this objective.

The material in this chapter offers a great starting point for the User Manual. The high-level actions and the system processing steps are in place. Of course, there are still some areas to complete, such as defining the detailed validation rules for each data element. The next chapter builds on the elements discussed in this chapter and starts to outline the foundations for ...