Implementation The software development life cycle SDLC

6.5 The incremental model 123 album players, trips, matches, etc.; information about the club joining fees, train- ing days, etc.; and a feedbackdiscussion section. After interviewing the client the student was able to prioritise each of these requirements according to their value on a 1-to-10 scale. For example, having an attractive home page was identified as the most important feature of the site and was assigned a ‘value’ value of 10. Having a photographs section was deemed least important and this was assigned as ‘value’ value of 4. The student then estimated how long each of these requirements would take to develop and produced a cost scale. In this case the student estimated that setting up a discussion forum on the web site would take the most effort needing to develop a database in the background to store comments and link threads together and consequently assigned this an effort score of 8. Conversely, setting up a page with contact details for club officials would be relatively easy and this was assigned an effort score of 4. The resulting Value-Cost table is shown in Table 6.1. Once the student calculated the value-to-cost ratios, she was able to prioritise the order of the development shown in the last column of the table. The student worked on the homemain page first, getting an overall structure in place and showing this to the client. With a few minor changes and suggestions from the client, the student then went on to design and develop the club information page and so on. By prioritising the release of the system in this way, the student ensured that only those additions valuable to the site were implemented in order. It reduces the chances of ‘gold plating’ adding features to a system that cost a lot of effort for very little reward unless time allows. If the student ran out of time on the project they would at least have added a number of useful features to the system. Any features not included may be identified as future workenhancements. Example 2 continued Functional Increment Value Cost VC Ratio Priority Homemain page 10 5 2.0 1 Match fixtures page 8 6 1.3 4 = Results page 6 6 1.0 7 Diarydates page 7 6 1.2 6 Duty rota page 8 6 1.3 4= Commentsfeedback page 5 8 0.6 8 Committee contact details 6 4 1.5 3 Photographs 4 8 0.5 8 Club information page 8 5 1.6 2 Table 6.1 A valuecost ratio table for an amateur football club web site development