Preparing for Design › Confirming the Transition Strategy

Confirming the Transition Strategy

The overall concern of transition is with changing the business and its systems together to support a new set of business requirements.

Although transition is still some way off at this point, you should consider the transition strategy now. If a strategy has already been produced during analysis, it should be reviewed and revised.

The following transition issues are critical:

• Who will be responsible for transition? What information will they need?
• In a distributed environment, where will data be stored? What processing is needed to maintain it and provide it to applications? You need to know the location names to be used whenever a procedure must select a location. This is especially critical where client/server technology is to be used.
• How will the newly implemented entities be populated initially in new databases, either manually or through a conversion program, all at once or portions at a time? If you decide to use a conversion program, someone will need to design and construct it.
• How will the newly implemented system be phased in while the old ones phase out? The new system may replace the old system overnight or the old and new systems may run in parallel. The new system may be implemented all at once or a portion at a time. Duplicate maintenance may be required to synchronize the old and new databases, and possibly to integrate them, which will also require maintenance. The duplicate maintenance could be handled dynamically, or synchronization transactions may be batched.

The decisions are largely dependent on the organization, but the intent here is to fire the imagination to consider transition issues.

These considerations may yield a requirement for some special procedures to be designed for transition, or may point out some special transition logic to be addressed during procedure logic design.

Identifying and addressing transition issues at this point helps you avoid later unpleasant surprises for the user.