Determining what your application needs to track

To determine what your application needs to do, gather requirements from those in your organization who provide information for, and manage, the business process your application intends to serve. This could include users, project managers, business analysts, and administrators.

During your analysis, identify transition points in the process, where data moves from one state to another. Because AR System applications can control transitions and enforce business rules, you need a clear understanding of what the application must do for accurate execution of the business process.

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Gather the following information:

  • What kinds of information do users need?
  • What is the life cycle of the data? How long must data be stored? (Indefinitely, for N months or years)? What happens to data after this point?
  • What types of information can be tracked together?
  • Where does the data come from? Other systems? User input?
  • Where could redundant data entry occur?
  • Where can data be just referenced or displayed instead of entered or modified?
  • Where can data be reused?
  • Following normal business practices, when will the application's data become irrelevant?

The number of forms that you create depends on the smallest unit of data that you want to track and how you want that data to relate to other types of data. For example, to keep all data about assets in a single form, the asset form needs fields for information about manufacturers.

Important

 To avoid duplicating information about manufacturers for each asset, your application could have a form for assets, and link it to a separate form for manufacturers through workflow and logical joins.

 A complete trouble ticket application might consist of a main form that contains the caller ID, issue description, and work log information and several secondary forms that are linked to the main form to manage caller information or aging tickets.  For complete descriptions of the key components that make up AR System applications, see the Key Concepts section.

 

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