In the beginning, we knew nothing about immigration service and the immigration policy of US. But understanding immigration service and policy of US is a mandatory for this project development. Thus, this became the greatest challenge right after we started the project;

The project has the feature of being very sophisticated, complicated and multi-interaction.  Some part is not very clear and even the client himself does not have the very clear panorama for it, though the contact wrote a very specific spec;

The system requires large PDF forms to be created and handled. The PDF generation encountered many tricky issues and the PDF plugin cannot be very flexible as it comes from the third party;

Client requires nice scalability and easy-to-use feature for the system;

The immigration forms that are continuously updating and the maintenance of the website also require high;

Regarding the challenge above, from prototype to project sign off, Nova has built a 6-member team, including 1 QA and 1 designer. From the very beginning, Nova worked out the complete iteration plan and milestone for the project. In the following development, when a milestone has been achieved, Nova will inform the client for testing. 

1) Through various different ways, including IM discussion, on-site conference, correspondences, prototype confirmation, document records and so on, Nova team large frequently communicate with the client for the requirement and carefully understanding the requirement to avoid the misunderstanding most. During the development, the daily questions to the requirement will be rectified and confirmed again with client face-to-face, by a separate discussion group. 

2) With Axure RP, we quickly made the prototype simple and easy to understand, with no misunderstand for work scope. This saved the requirement clarification very much and let us focuses on project development more.

3) Summarize the complicated requirement and business logic systematically on the OneNote, which was shared to each team member to discuss easily.

1) During development, strictly based on prototype to develop iteration by iteration and with several milestones;

2) Verify if each milestone meets the client’s need to make the project in the right track;

3) In the beginning, we often have on-site communication with client and we leveraged this much for requirement clarification and solution confirmation.

4) For the uncertain logic that neither of us is clear, we would discuss it in depth, in a project-oriented way;

5) Use OneNote to record and update all of the requirements and changes, which can be shared for the team and the client both;

6) For the ambiguous details, even though we know in general how to deal with, still confirm with the client, avoiding the potential risks;

7) Towards the end of the project, we wrote user manuals, avoiding client’s worry for the configuration;

The full-time QA is involved for the project testing for the better quality. The first around is by PM, recorded with OneNote. The second around is by full-time tester, with Mantis for bug management. 

The success of this project considerably improved client’s working and management efficiency;

The success of completing, delivering, deploying, launching and running the project on time greatly reduced the management cost for the client;

Expanded the client's business area farther to South-East Asia, Latin America and other countries and regions of the world;