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Chapter: A
Scalable Software Development Model
3.
Mockup
Designs
Once you have answered the questions you had about implementing your
project consider returning to the notes you created during the first
phase of Project Planning. With the new information you have derived
through your research, refine your ideas into graphical representations
of your program.
By now you should have a clearer idea of what your end product should
look like. Avoid prematurely designing your project only to realize
your goals where not realistic given a particular time-frame or some
other design flaw, following this development model in the
predetermined order will help avoid such a situation.
Use the mockup design phase of software development to start drawing
out conceptual sketches of your program, in the form of schematic
diagrams that outline the program's flow of control (which we will
discuss in more detail in Step 8) and map out the user experience you
hope to achieve.
If your software is visually oriented you may wish to create more
detailed and specific designs of your application, for example by
designing an interface for a data visualization program or designing a
theme for an online game. Consider how your designs can contribute to
making the user's experience more immersive.
The design phase of software development can also help to identify and
even solve how programmatic implementations of visualizing data might
be addressed through various programming methodologies.
Mockup Designs
should include some rudimentary visualizations of the final project and
schematic diagrams detailing the program's flow of control.
4.
Data Acquisition:
Sourcing the data needed for your project.
Obtain all the data you need to create your software, this data could
include statistical information from books, tabulated data from a
website, printed lists of sales from business owners or even
screen-scraped data.
Screen-scraping data is a technique that has been in use for many years
and is used to acquire data from new and old computers alike. In
modern times one of it's most common implementations involves the
process of acquiring data that is in no particular standardized format
and commonly sourced from from an html page of a website. The idea of
screen-scraping is that data exists remotely from the program you are
creating, in a format that your program cannot process. As a result you
may need to write another program that serves as an in between
application converting the remote data from an undesirable format to
the desired format of the main software program you are
developing.
Screen-scraping is a technique of data acquisition that is
differentiated from parsing, as the data that is being acquired is not
intended for another software program but often intended to be read by
a human. Parsing data is something that happens much later in the
software development process and relies on proper data acquisition.
Parsing data is something we will discuss in more detail during the
seventh phase of the software development model.
Acquired data
might be in the form of a spreadsheet, a text document, images and many
other different formats that might not, even at this stage, be digital.
5.
Filter
Filtering data is simply the process of removing all components of your
data that are not necessary for the proper functioning of the main
program. If your data is in a Processing friendly format such as
tabulated data, a multi-line text file, a comma separated value text
file or other similar format the process of filtering data could be as
simple as selecting those components (including spaces and new line
characters in a text file) and deleting them. However, if your data is
not in a Processing friendly format you might have to spend quite a bit
of time filtering out data that is not relevant to your program.
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