Transition
This phase lasted 23 days. Transition includes system and acceptance testing and focuses on delivering the system into production. In this phase, the team gradually deployed the system to the target users. Feedback from an initial release resulted in further refinements that they incorporated over the course of two transition phase iterations.
Extensive testing occurred, including beta testing. Fine-tuning of the existing hosted applications and integrated desktop took place as well as rework to address significant defects. Although users and test managers tested integration early enough, during the elaboration (hosting of applications) and construction (UAT in the testing environment) phases, differences in set-up between preproduction or production and UAT environment couldn’t be predicted. Most of the issues resulted from special settings of the hosted applications in the preproduction or production environment. The time and effort spent in the transition phase was significant owing to the fine-tuning required for the entire infrastructure to improve performance and assure smooth, stable operation.
The phased-rollout approach that came next included extensive beta testing by small groups before the company released the system to the whole end-user population, including the final technical documentation with detailed physical-architecture and technical-user manuals. The company conducted exhaustive training programs, addressing both operation and support.
To exit the transition phase, the project team had to pass the product release milestone, which included the following items. Business stakeholder acceptance: the business stakeholders were satisfied with and accepted the system. Operations acceptance: the people responsible for operating the system in production were satisfied with the relevant procedures and documentation. Support acceptance: the people responsible for supporting the system once in production were satisfied with the relevant procedures and documentation. Cost and estimate acceptance: the current expenditures were acceptable, and reasonable estimates had been made for future production costs.
Project Development Issues
As the project progressed, the team ran into several issues, most of which are common in similar projects.
Personnel
The developers adopted the process pretty quickly because many of the object-oriented development practices were familiar to them already and they preferred an iterative and incremental development approach. However, the development team leader and the database administrator (DBA) had a “big design up front” (BDUF)—also known as “big modeling up front” (BMUF)11—mindset that they started to overcome only after seeing that the emergent-design approach actually worked in practice. The business analyst tried hard to learn how to apply use cases effectively in combination with other requirements artifacts. One tester was initially concerned that there weren’t enough detailed models to inspect and review. However, he soon realized that the closer collaboration among the team and the combination of significant developer testing using the bank’s testing tool and testing in the large activities such as system testing and UAT were sufficient.