Every business that needs a media application has its own unique requirements with its own challenges. Using Busby to make these applications provides a significant head start as opposed to creating applications from scratch. Many architectural decisions have been made which provides confidence that the end application will work reliably.
This page describes a typical process that Squared Paper employ to deliver and then support the creation of a new Busby system.
Starting a project
The first decision when deploying a Busby project is which engineers should carry out the work. There are three main options:
| Squared Paper engineering team | The Squared Paper team are the top experts in Busby, they both deliver systems and make the core product. |
| Trusted SI partners | There are a growing number of independent SIs that have knowledge of Busby and can help deploy Busby systems. |
| In house expertise | Squared Paper provide training courses to allow in-house staff to come up to speed with Busby, so they can configure and deploy their own systems |
It is not necessary to choose one of these options exclusively. It is common for the Squared Paper team to make the first set of workflows and then hand over the ownership to in house expertise.
Application delivery process
Busby supports making enterprise applications quickly by following a Rapid Application Development model. This allows for prototyping, quick feedback and the ability to change the design as the implementation is in progress.
Be aware that all of these steps both feed to the next step and feedback to earlier steps. So for example once a prototype is made, the requirements might change due to user feedback.
1. Define the requirements
At the initial stage of the project a high level set of requirements should be made. This is a broad picture idea of what should be made – describing what the problem to be solved is, and giving an idea of what a successful deployment would be. Some consideration of non-functional details may also be required, such as redundancy models, expected load and what environment the system should run on.
At this stage the first high level workflows and resources will be defined in the Busby configuration tool. Whiteboard drawings of any new user interfaces will be made.
2. Prototype
Once the basic requirements have been defined the system needs to be created to the point that the customer can give feedback. This requires filling out the details of workflows, creating test harnesses, and making the first generation of UIs for feedback.
Concurrently at the prototype stage of the implementation process, the basic deployment plan is made. This looks at what systems need to be deployed and where. In particular there might be staging and delivery systems, machines might need to be spun up, and security procedures followed.
3. Create working system
Once a prototype has been made there is now a feedback loop between where the engineers are creating the details of the system, and then confirming the behaviour with the customer. The engineering here includes creating custom services, adding complex workflows, making and tweaking specialist UIs – as well as checking security and scaling, and adding automated tests.
4. Deploy
Although defined here as the final step, deployment is in fact a continual process. During the earlier steps a deployment pipeline is generated that moves software updates through the various different deployments – eg development, staging, production. After each step a mixture of automated and manual testing should occur.
Living with Busby
Once these steps have been followed a Busby system can be put operational, but this isn’t the end of the story. The process can continue over-and-over, adapting to the changing needs of the business. Busby is designed with the idea that business requirements will change, and the Busby application will need to adapt to those changes.
Squared Paper provide 24×7 support for operational issues, along with the ability to connect directly to the developers.