Our Development Approach

As trained Software Engineers, the project managers and programmers in Signetique are well versed in all the popular software development paradigms or approach. However, after considering the scope and nature
of your project, we would be using the Classical System Development
Life Cycle approach to construct your system. Although this approach
was designed originally to assist system development teams in designing software for mainframe based systems, it continued to be one of the most popular approach until now.

The components of the Classical Approach is as follows:


a) Preliminary Investigation

This is the first activity prior to an initiation of a system development. The main objectives of this phase are to ensure that the system to be developed aligns with organisational goals and is achievable with current technology, assigned budget, and available resources. Signetique will work closely with the Project Manager in charge of your project to look in to these details.

b) Requirements Determination

The purpose of this stage is to learn exactly what takes place in the current system (eg. traditional ways etc). In this phase, Signetique, together with your project manager will research on the exact process(es) companies have to go through now to buy/sell products and their respective functions. With the new system in mind, we will fully document what should take place, and to make recommendation to management on the various solutions.

The role that Signetique will take in this phase is to ensure that all the functions in the current system is defined, problems identified, and how we can modify certain functions so as to e-nable the system. At the end of this phase, Signetique will present the functional specifications for your review.

c) System Design

The objective of the System Design phase is to determine how to construct the proposed system based on the Functional Specifications.

d) System Development

This is the phase which the system is actually constructed. Tables in the database are designed, relationships defined, and the actual coding takes place. The end product of this phase will be the functioning and documented system.

e) System Testing

As the name suggests, this phase is to ensure that the system comply with the Functional Specifications. In addition, we will ensure that the system is reliable and accurate. Test data will be prepared for this phase and users will be encouraged to go through the whole process.

f) System implementation

Finally, after approval of all the results and functions of the new system,
the application will go "live".

In an ideal situation, the phases above is carried out one after another.

RDBMS Database approach

We will be utilising the Relational Database Management System as our database system of choice. Relational databases are powerful because
they require few assumptions about how data is related or how it will be extracted from the database. As a result, the same database can be viewed in many different ways. An important feature of relational systems is that a single database can be spread across several tables. This differs from flat-file databases, in which each database is self-contained in a single table. Almost all full-scale database systems are RDBMS's. Small database systems, however, use other designs that provide less flexibility in posing queries.

Some companies that offers RDBMS database systems :

More importantly, systems built on RDBMS is fully scalable. According
to TCX DataKonsultAB, the MySql database engine that is in use in their corporation now has 40 databases containing 10,000 tables, of which more than 500 tables have more than 7 million rows. This is about 100 gigabytes of mission-critical data. (Source : www.mysql.com)

The database engine is able to handle such a huge amount of data over a relatively short period of time and yet maintain data integrity and performance because it is fully expandable. Even though the database is large, it is still able to perform complex search and retrieval functions without a noticeable performance lag.

All our programs are constructed using the modular approach. This means that the design of our system composed of separate components that can be connected together. This greatly enhances scalability because a developer can replace or add any one component (module) without affecting the rest of the system. This is important because as the Internet landscape changes every few months, and where competing companies are rushing to value add their sites, there is a frequent need to "go back to the source code" to add new features. If your system is NOT modular
in nature, it will greatly hamper the effort.