ATO Techniques & Methods: methodology database

Impact: The impact to the business was that I was able to add in new methodologies into the database and deploy it in a number of days, rapidly accommodating change in the organisation’s strategic direction. Details: The ATO employs various methodologies, depending on the size of the project. Small projects use agile methodologies, while larger, mission critical projects use classical development life-cycles. One of the resources available to project managers, from the Techniques & Methods group, is ISDM – Integrated System Development Methodology. The resource is a group of tools including a Visual Basic application, MS Access database, links to or templates of standard documentation (such as project plans, proposal, scoping, requirements, technical, deployment and training documents). The key task was to restructure the Visual Basic application into objects. I chose three layers – Presentation, Business and database. The presentation layer is Visual Basic – centric. Other presentation layers could be developed, such as a web-centric model, thereby allowing re-use of the lower layers. The Business layer is simple for this application but isolates out the business functionality from the database. Therefore, other applications (such as MS Project) could access the business layer objects. Finally, the database layer is currently in MS Access but it is considered that in future, the application could be migrated to MS SQL Server. The database objects contain code that is suitable to be migrated into SQL server as stored procedures and therefore the application can capitalise on scaling up. The business objective of the restructuring was to move the custom design of screens from within Visual Basic to within the database. The ATO wanted to be able to load multiple techniques or methodologies into the database without having to create new Visual Basic screens each time. I developed a database design to load each screen from database files. I also restructured the tables to use more of a relational model rather than flat tables. I originally saw this approach in Seibel Janna (CRM) and realised that it was effective. This created more flexibility in the views that could be created and cleared up a lot of the custom code. Essentially this pushed the complexity away from the application and into the database structures.