Syed Waqar Hussain

During April 09 on saturday night of second last week before having new fiscal year we had a call of our friend regarding new project. Yes this was our another attempt to do project with in 20 days time span. This time Nayab Agency, a shipping and forwarding agency situated in Karachi, Pakistan.

Project Overview:

Nayab is small agency related to shipping and forward type of work in local market of Pakistan. They are based on 5 number of employees who use traditional MS. Excel for their external and internal reporting. Mr. Sikandar was a stakeholder from Nayab in this project. We internally called this project as “NAYAB ONLINE BILLING”.

Now let me explain you our experiences by each phases of our customized process to make a project.

Situation Analysis:

Mr. Sikandar is a responsible to handle external reporting area in Nayab. But he normally lives outside the Office premises and sometimes out of city. Due to not coming office punctually he used to miss all reporting deadlines stated by Pakistan Law.

Mr. Sikandar sketched a simple requirement, He said that “I want to complete my reporting work within time from anywhere in the world”. He also explained that he wants this project before 1st of June 2009 (new fiscal year). That’s it, actually that was enough for us to accept or reject a project, and guess we accepted the project with the constraint of time limitations.

Acquisition / Financial Procurement:

After having analysis we asked Nayab to reserve domain and hosting first for project. Our analyst suggested domain name should cover corporate not only this application and then NAYAB21C means Nayab in 21 century discovered.

According to our policy we also asked Nayab to submit our advance payment. It sometimes hurts our clients but really we can not go without it. Hope you understand.

Wiremapping / Sketching:

In intial stage Mr. Sikandar mentioned us the future program regarding Nayab, he wanted Nayab also for client, He stated that client should be able to track their bills,profiles and taxes. But this requirement is still under discussion and will be part of phase 2.

We sketched a basic requirement on paper, we consider four functional modules of this application which was manage bills, manage clients, manage agents and reports. In each functional module we consider basic features like searching, adding, editing and deleting a record.

Except these four functional modules we also proposed some basic modules like change passwords, manager profiles, secure login area, and etc. We came up with basic sitemap and proper requirement specification and made it sign off from Mr. Sikandar.

Layout Design / User Interface:

As our creative nature, we did user interface design very sepratley from all other phases. We gave a very simple and user friendly look for Nayab. Orignally Nayab was using a traditional navy blue color but we decided to give it greenish look as owner of Nayab was some patriotic.

We used a very simple approach where user can find all stuff easily in the front of screen. We consider single color and statistic typography in Nayab due to no fancy requirement from user, although it looks like a web 2.0 interface but its not Web 2.0.

We used traditional font Arial, Verdana, and used simple CSs. We used a simple icon based navigation. Thanks for Smashing Magazine Freebies Icons for particular job. After second attempt we got a final approval from user regarding interface design.

Technical Design / Coding:

Now everything was a very clear to us regarding Nayab, we had requirements, approved sitemap and approved layout from Mr. Sikandar. We just started a database design on MySQL we used simple and optimized approach in database to avoid any extra load and time consuming. Although it is going to be large database till june 2010 but it will be greatly accessible due to our effort in optimization.

We also started writing technical code in PHP, used very simple logic to perform every complex operation. Coding  structure was also very simple everything is modular based and seprated from main file.

We used xhtml transitional standard to write interface pages, transitional standard because we used tables as data grid to display records.

Configuration / Pilot Run:

We configured Nayab on web server and had a 5 days pilot run based on Nayab’s original work situation. We collected some bills from Nayab and processed in our web application to check website on high level basis.

Testing / Inspection:

After having a application we came to test it, our testing team had a several test cases which were produced parallel with design phase. We performed unit testing first and the went to integration testing. Obviously we faced issues in testing and that was a reason to keep testing phase before submitting to user.

Anyway we had a great test run with approximately 20 number of issues related to design, database and reporting formats. We also tested some minor but important stuff such as loading time of web, database optimization, security checks, and others.

User Acceptance / CRP:

Now we had converted Mr. Sikandar’s requirements into real web application. We presented an application in conference room of Nayab. Mr. Sikandar was fully happy with out effort and welcomed our application as live application.

We also asked Nayab peoples to run application here as testing with different test cases and scenerios. Due to our strong effort in Inspection / Testing stage we cleared User Acceptance / CRP stage very easily.

Go Live:

Its time for party, before went to party we recieved our balance invoice from Nayab and send Nayab web application on live. We refreshed database, reset all agents accounts with dummy passwords and activate printer settings according to Nayab’s printer.

Around 10:00 pm on 20th May we mark Nayab as live website and had a successive smoke of Benson with Mr. Sikandar.

Maintenance:

According to our terms of references with Nayab, We decided to provide 6 months free maintenance and after Go Live phase. Mr. Sikandar gave us some minor maintenance issues such as having one more field on Billing report, Calculation approach in Bill Statement and etc.

Phase Out / Project Closure:

After six months of GO LIVE we closed our project successfully, and asked Nayab to give us feedback through our Project Assessment document. Which had a fabulous remarks by Nayab team.

Summary / Conclusion:

Client Name: Nayab Agencies.
Project URL: http://www.nayab21c.org
Total duration of project: 20 days!
Total number of human resource from our side: 1 analyst, 1 developer and 1 designer.
Tools used in project: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Dreamweaver for PHP+XHTML+CSS, MYSQL (PHP MYADMIN).
Cost of Project: 20000 PKR with domain and hosting.

Screenshots from Live System: