Case Study: Consulting service for a Digital Signage operator
Background story
As an emerging new medium, Digital Signage is rapidly spreading throughout the whole world. As per ABI Research, an American research
organization, total revenue from the digital signage equipment market in the United States ¨C including hardware, software, installation,
and maintenance -- is expected to grow by about 33% in 2009. The client in this case study is from Norwegian advertising company.
They have perceived the enormous opportunities of Digital Signage, thus they decided to develop an independent system for his own use.
For more than 1 year, the client were using a system rented from another company; however this system was not satisfactory as it
could only support basic functions, besides its UI was quite coarse, which made it look like a trial version. In order to improve
the productivity and meet the increasing business demands, the client decided to develop their own system. When the client turned to us,
what they had in mind was just a rough idea of what the system should be and what it should do, rather than full picture covered every detail.
Taking this situation into consideration, we recommend to the client our consulting service which aimed to help the client clarify
every requirement and work out a detailed specification eventually.
Consulting process
Throughout the consulting process, we have adopted a series of best practices in software requirements analysis, such like the cause of
the requirement analysis, software functional requirement analysis, software performance requirement analysis and software quality analysis etc.
In the first place, we investigated the business background of the system. We asked a few questions: why did the client need this system?
How the client would use this system? etc. The initial analysis of the business background helped us understand the position of the system
in client's business applications, so to ensure logical design and planning at later stage.
Subsequently, we managed to understand the end users of the system. How will different users use this system? How will they interact
with system and what are the relationships between each user? Answers to these questions enabled us define the logical units of the
system and the functions of each unit.
While carrying out functional requirement analysis, our consultant researched a number of similar products which have existed in the market.
Then the consultant abstracted from those products the features which meet the client's requirements, and lay the features as the basic
functional modules. The next step was to customize each module based on the client's specific requirements. We adopt use case to describe
exactly the unique requirements, and divide the use case into function units or UI. Finally we asked the client to confirm the units and UI.
Benefits to the Client
To conclude, what this consulting process went though was the requirement analysis stage of the software lifecycle. Updated document was
submitted to the client on daily basis, so that all the modifications are trackable. The whole process was transparent, controllable and communicative.
When the consulting process came to the end, the client received a detailed software specification, based on which software developers
can easily estimate the time and resourced required to develop the system. The most obvious benefit to the client was he just invested
a small part of his budget but obtained the estimations of the feasibility, budget, and timeline of the system to be developed.
Performance requirement analysis and quality analysis were independent from functional requirement analysis, so that performance and
quality requirements could be clarified at the very beginning and carried out throughout the whole consulting process.
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