Advent Dennis

Today's post is a brief update on Project Dennis for those who are interested. If reading about systems analysis wants to make you put pins in your eyes, I suggest you surf on to one of the very amusing blogs listed on the left...


At the beginning of this month we contracted Simplicity IT (read why, here) to build the Project Dennis public alpha site. What's a "public alpha site" you may ask (as I did)?


This will be a phase of the application that, while open to use by internet users at large, will not be marketed, will have restricted functionality and content, and will be branded differently from the beta/full site. It will contain, and allow us to test, the fundamental, innovative components that will drive the site. In particular we will be looking to refine the three areas where we feel that we are at the edge of, and perhaps pushing, the envelope: Social-networking, opinion collation & evaluation, and collaborative data structuring.


(note: no actual envelopes will be harmed during the making of this site).


During the recent workshops that we have undertaken with Simplicity we have sharpened up some of the less-well defined aspects of the project concept. These were areas that we had deliberately intended to work through with our selected developers, to draw on their expertise, and it has been exciting to bring these into focus.


We now have very exhaustive descriptions for system actors and use-cases, and Simplicity are working on the technical documentation for subsystems, entity-relationships and functional specifications. We are all looking forward to the next stage of rapid-prototyping in January, when we actually get to start mucking about with pages and buttons and stuff....


If you got through this post without dozing off, you might be interested to know that we will be looking for a number of volunteer testers in the new year to help us with user feedback during the alpha phase. If that sounds like something you would like to be involved with, drop us a line on the ATIA contacts page and we will keep you up to date with developments. The password is Ni!