Marketing Data Analysis Application Development

The business research division of a large international quick service restaurant corporation is porting its beloved marketing data analysis application from a Macintosh Platform to a Windows Platform. Aside from typical large project concerns of cost and time, they have three primary concerns:

1. The quality of the finished product since they will be responsible for ongoing support of the code.
2. The accuracy and performance compared to the current application. The new application must meet or beat the current levels for the users to accept the system.
3. The security on the application. Data cannot be left where prying eyes might see.

My consulting firm was hired to port the marketing data analysis application and enhance its operation. I was the technical leader responsible for the overall design, development, and testing of the application.

• Coordinated the development tasks for a team of six developers
• Wrote unit test plans for each coding task and unit tested completed modules
• Provided development estimates and technology consulting to project management
• Established and wrote the Visual Basic programming standards for the projectand the graphical user interface standards for the application
• Enforced the VB/VBA coding and graphical user interface standards through periodic code reviews
• Defined individual user types and documented user profiles
• Solicited end user feedback to the interfaces and incorporated suggestions
• Conducted graphical user interface design and prototyping sessions
• Researched and studied best practices and programming methods for VB
• Designed the application object model using Object-Oriented Analysis and Design methods
• Programmed more than 25,000 lines of VB/VBA code

Instituting the coding and interface standards (and holding the programmers accountable for them) ensured a quality application was developed. By involving the users early on in the interface prototyping, we expedited user acceptance of the system and cut the application training time from two weeks to three days. Our design matched the performance of the Macintosh application and met the strict security requirements.

The most rewarding part of this project was witnessing what followed afterward. Our methods and our deliverables became the best practices model for future development projects within both our consulting firm and the corporation we were hired by.