Verifying the Design › Facilitated Sessions, Walkthroughs, and Inspections

Facilitated Sessions, Walkthroughs, and Inspections

Facilitated sessions are meetings of business staff and developers to explore and verify the structure of the system, or some aspect of system design. These sessions are widely referred to as Joint Application Design or JAD sessions.

You can incorporate many general group working techniques into your facilitated sessions. CA Gen can be used to record design decisions and to prototype parts of the system.

As a final test of the correctness of the design, a series of structured walkthroughs is recommended.

A structured walkthrough is a formal, step-by-step inspection of design results.

The following list details the levels of walkthroughs:

• First level—You can present the detailed design results to the analysts who built the business model on which it is based.
• Second level—You can present a subset of the design to the most knowledgeable intended users of the system, using presentation or prototyping techniques.

  Such walkthroughs not only verify the completeness and correctness of the design, but serve to point out potential problems in usability as well.

• Third level—Where technical performance has been identified as an issue, you can present the results to technical specialists who may identify performance problems or advise on use of the planned technical facilities.

You should address the problems identified during design verification before considering the design complete. You can then use the verified design in system construction and transition.