Designing a Digital Service application

As a developer, when you develop a Digital Service application by using the BMC Helix Innovation Studio SDK, follow the best practices and techniques used by development organizations to build any type of application:

User-centered design
Deep understanding of user stories
Agile development methodology
Use of configuration management and collaborative requirements
Source code management tools

Process overview

The following image gives an overview of the process for designing a digital service application:

221_Designing a digital service app.png

Analyze requirements

Use any methodology and tools to identify the requirements. The best practices include a complete understanding of the user requirements and the problems. Map the user requirements to the business goals of the application. Us a mature design process that is based on research and testing with actual target users at every phase of the application development.

Identify the following design requirements:

Business process needs and rules
Data entities such as the number of record definitions and fields required in the records
Users
Number of bundles such as Application and Library
Dependency of bundles
Bundles that need to be deployed together in a package
API design
- Transactions
- Performance

Design the application wireframe

The common elements of an application usually involve identifying user experiences, key data to be tracked, behavior of the system as the data changes, and tailoring the solution without code changes.

These can be captured as a set of the following design artifacts:

Design artifact	Description
Flow diagrams	Use a flow diagram to describe the business process. Consider the process for resolving a request. Depending on the type of request and different scenarios, the process can involve different elements such as: Notifications Assignments Approvals Manual steps Automated steps Integrations Conditional branching Calling other processes
Important records and fields	Make a note of the important objects that are identified for the process such as requests, assets, locations, attributes, and common patterns in the data model.
Constraints	Define the constraints and conditions needed to allow the users to modify the data model and process as part of tailoring the application. The following situations are some examples: Employees below grade 20 should not be assigned an office when they are onboarded. HR data is accessible only to employees in the HR organization.
Key user experience	Identify the user interface elements required for the user interaction, type of interactions, and tailorable views required for the UI.
Modularity	Consider the following points when you divide an application into modules: Deployment packages in BMC Helix Innovation Studio can contain their own namespace code, data, and definitions, and can describe all their dependencies. If the application design is complex or contains different functional areas over time, it is critical to organize the solution elements for easy maintenance and make sure that the entire solution is as robust as possible. To create new solutions with minimal coding, create reusable modules.

Prepare an inventory of functionality

Make a list of the required functional modules and the types of artifacts that the modules describe. Prepare a worksheet that includes the functionalities for specific deployment packages and determine whether any existing libraries meet the requirements.

The following table shows an example of an inventory of functionalities:

Package	Functional area	Leverage existing libraries	Custom services	New record definitions	New business logic	New user interface
Task Management Library	Track task resolution	Approval Notification Assignment Foundation	Outlook connector Custom @Action for Task Routing	Task Task Note Task Part	Task Tracking Process Task Validation Rules	Custom Task Submit Client Task Console View Task Update View
Task API Library	REST API for Tasking	Task Management	Task Domain Object	NA	NA	NA

Map new design objects to the application

Use the inventory of functionalities to decide the tools required for coding and developing the definitions. The following table shows an example:

New design object	BMC Helix Innovation Studio SDK artifact type	Tool
Task Management Library	Deployment package and library bundle project	Maven archetype
Outlook connector	Custom service	Eclipse
Custom @Action for Task Routing	Custom service	Not applicable
Task Task Note Task Part	Record definition	BMC Helix Innovation Studio
Task Tracking Process	Process definition	BMC Helix Innovation Studio
Task Validation Rules	Rule definition	BMC Helix Innovation Studio
Custom Task Submit Client	Client code	Eclipse or favorite IDE for JavaScript Grunt for debugging
Custom Task Map View Component	Client code	Eclipse or favorite IDE for JavaScript Grunt for debugging
Task Console View Task Update View	View definition	BMC Helix Innovation Studio
Task API Library	Deployment package and library bundle project	Maven archetype
Task REST Domain Object	Custom service	Eclipse IDE

Where to go from here

Developing-applications-by-using-BMC-Helix-Innovation-Studio