Software Proposal

Business Case

The business that this project hopes to achieve is to build and make commercially available, software that solves major problems in engineering and tech design. The software shall be given to companies and businesses on purchase of licenses and shall sufficiently increase their productivity.

Several businesses are using the same methodology to visually display their ideas and products. Engineering firms including aeronautical, mechanical, electrical and astronautic firms are using the same method during their meetings and prototyping procedures. This is highly in-efficient and causes a lot of mismanagement.

Exchange of engineering diagrams, proposals and schemas between teams that are geographically distant also contributes to the problem stack. Exchange of these diagrams takes a lot of time and consumes a lot of working hours which is bad for these businesses. Moreover, maintenance of confidentiality of these diagrams and schemas is also a big concern for large firms. It is essential that a platform that ensures strong, fast and secure communication be available in the market to solve these problems.

Teams and businesses that need to operate together for a certain project need a continuous project manager that can act as a common medium of communication between the two. At the enterprise level, especially in the engineering industry, it is essential that a common platform be available for each participant team to ensure effective teamwork and collaboration; therefore, reducing the chance of mismanagement and disorder during the work process and so on.

When analyzing time consumption and the associated costs of a business development process, it can be seen that the majority of the fiscal strength is consumed in the management of mishaps and for the optimization of business processes. It is essential that a common platform be available for the industry that can provide discipline to the business process handlers and can log each and every decision in a graphical form so that it can be viewed later on.

In many businesses, during crisis and project mismanagement, it is quite hard for managers to find out where they made the mistake that caused the havoc in the first place. Therefore, a strong system that can log each decision and, if possible, predict consequences beforehand using strategic analysis is necessary.

Modeling complex systems is hard and with the growing advent of engineering technology and increasing complexity of project scopes, it is getting harder and harder for companies and businesses to model their ideas graphically. Need for a system that can effectively model complex problems and designs is increasing and a strong software suite optimized for this purpose is a necessity.

Visio shall be aimed to solve each and every one of these problems. It shall not only be made capable of generating highly graphical and complex visual graphics for engineers and teams, but shall also be able to effectively store and manage work processes that can be customized. The software shall manage the proceedings of the work and shall provide an eye-catching graphical user-interface to improve its usage in several technical areas. It shall provide clear and reliable communication between its different instances that shall be operating in different parts of the world. The projects that shall be managed using this software shall be very easy to handle and reduce the change of human errors. Using several built-in functions and utilities, engineers of various fields shall find complex tasks really easy and in short, benefit the entire business industry.

The niche that this software shall fill will constitute of the following:

· Astronautic engineering firms

· Aeronautical engineering firms

· Electrical engineering firms

· Mechanical engineering firms

Visio shall have the capability of creating graphical images in vector form to allow users to compose, edit and define vector spaces and therefore make complex diagrams. The software will also help its users simulate the designs by virtualization technology. The software shall ensure communication between different teams that are working on the same project and shall ensure that their communication and their work are confidential.

Project scope

Visio software shall be designed to optimize and automate several business processes. The software shall not only allow several teams to maximize their productivity, it shall also allow them to model, create and simulate several engineering designs for software, hardware and other engineering items.

Software like Visio currently does not exist within the market. Other products that exist within the market include software for project management, software for creating Gantt charts and software for mathematical modeling. No software exists that can handle full scale project management allow engineers to perform complex calculations at the same time.

System Development Approach

The system development approach chosen for this project is the SDLC approach. The System Development Life Cycle approach is a six-step approach towards the development of a system. This development approach is used in software engineering to develop systems that are to be deployed at a large scale. This system approach shall allow the team members to carefully build a system that can operate on a large scale and serve millions of different firms operating globally.

The SDLC approach has six steps: project definition, systems study, design, programming, installation and post-implementation. All of these steps ensure that the product produced at the very end is completely sound and easy to use.

Visio is complex software. It requires a lot of requirements gathering before an initial design can be implemented. Moreover, since the technology doesn’t exist, the development of key components that would serve all of its business uses shall take a lot of time and effort. Since the complexity of the development process increases the chance of error and design flaws, it is important that every step be completed sequentially. This implies that advancements in the development process shall only be made if the preliminary stages have been completed effectively.

Other approaches like the prototyping approach are not used because the cost of production do not allow for prototypes to be made. Experimentation is not viable in a project of this magnitude. A sequential development process is necessary to adopt in this scenario.

Project plan

System Acquisition Approach

Visio is complex software and its entire development process is supposed to be completed in a short amount of time. System analysis allows us to acquire software and technology that can boost up the development process and aid the developers in several ways. The acquisition process is a tricky process in which a strategy has to be developed to devise a criterion. The criterion is then used to select a software and/or product that can aid in speeding up the original process.

The acquisition strategy for the development of Visio that we have chosen is the DoD acquisition strategy. The strategy has the following key benefits:

· Addresses business strategy: it addresses the main contracting approach including contract types, promoting techniques and addresses leasing arrangements

· Contracting strategy: it allows us to clearly understand and comprehend the contracting objectives concerned with various products and services that are to be chosen

· Sustainability: the strategy allows us to determine the sustainability of the systems that are to be acquired in the long run for the main development process

Feasibility Analysis

Visio is complex software and its development requires several integration processes. The development team needs to consider almost every aspect of the process so as to get each and everything prior to its initiation. A complete feasibility analysis of the entire project shall give the team a better idea as to how the development process is to be undertaken effectively to produce the maximum results.

Visio shall be designed by three teams:

· GUI/UX design teams

· Module development teams

· System analysts

Economic requirements

Each of the required team shall have at least 3 members that shall be responsible for the effective completion of the tasks that that team is assigned. The average wages of each type is given below:

Moreover acquisition of other software shall also add to the cost of the total budget required to kick-start the project.

Operational requirements

The entire software engineering process shall involve the following things

· 3 Intel computers with i7 cores and at least 16 gigs of RAM for each team

· High speed internet connectivity with at least 100MBPS bandwidth

· Suitable workspace equipped with furniture and other facilities

Technical requirements

The technical requirements shall include testing systems and testing software to test the limits of the software. The testing software shall be used by system analysts to test the limitations and strengths of the code that the development team writes.

Legal

The entire team’s employees shall be assigned work under a legal contract. The name of the software ‘Visio’ shall be registered and recognized at the international level. Each team member shall be made to sign a non-disclosure agreement that will prevent any leaks of technological ideas.