The design process was very linear in its development. There was little room for changes to the specifications after they were put up on the web. Because of this, the specifications posted and the actual application differed in many respects. Unforeseen problems developed during the implementation of the program that had to be corrected. These changes caused large inconsistencies between the technical documents (formal specs, and user manual) and also caused problems during the testing phases of the project (as some implementation no longer fit the test plans we had originally set out).

The design specifications did lay some framework that helped in the development of the application, and served as a guide to the coding team. An Object Oriented approach would have been more appropriate, though when the formal specifications were written. Our approach (using Data Flow Diagrams, and process specifications) didn't translate very well into the Object Oriented environment of Windows 95 and Visual Basic (the programming language used).

More time should be allocated in the later sections for face-to-face communications between the Supplier and Customer groups. This would have helped clarify several inconsistencies which were missed in the simple banter of comments over the web. The design the supplier group (us) developed had several portions unimplemented simply because we had unintentionally left them out of our specifications, the customer group though did not recognize the missing sections until the final presentation.

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