The Discovery Phase

“Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.” – Edward V Berard
It will never be easy, but a discovery phase makes it possible.

The goal of the discovery phase is for both client and developer to clearly understand the functional requirements of the site, and to document these requirements. The deliverable, at the end of the discovery phase, is a document, or set of documents, comprehensive enough for any professional development team to give a quote and time-line.

The deliverable often includes, but is not limited to:

  1. A text outline (often a MS Word document) of the pages and functionality of the site
  2. Wireframes that illustrate the User interfaces
  3. An ER Diagram that provides a recommendation for the database architecture.

Requirements will always change after development begins. A good discovery phase will keep these changes to a manageable minimum that does not compromise the budget or time-line.

For small sites, the entire discovery process may take only 1 or 2 hours. For complex, or innovative web-applications, the discovery phase can run 20 to 40 hours or more.

The discovery process begins during the initial, free consultation as the client explains the basic requirements of the site. My write-up of the first meeting will contain a guess at the total scope of the project, recommendations, and some starter questions.

The subsequent sessions consist of question and answer type dialog, in which I lead the client through an exploration of a fictitious user’s activity on the site. Through this dialog, the technical requirements and the best possible solution, organization, and presentation of the client’s vision are discovered.