Mission and Scope

What business problem does this project address?

There is a need for businesses to set up their own on-line store as rapidly and easily as possible. Virtually every business has customers that prefer to purchase on-line, but few businesses have the expertise or time to create an e-commerce site themselves. Custom-coded e-commerce sites also usually lack the advanced features found on big shopping sites, and may contain defects and security holes.

Active investors need constant awareness of market conditions and the state of their stock portfolio. Decisions to trade stocks are based on company financial data, company news, industry news, economic indicators, and simulation models. It is difficult for people to gather and consider all of the needed information when working under time pressure.

What is the goal of this project?

This project will produce an e-commerce website engine that is widely reusable by small- to medium-sized businesses, full featured, and easy to use and administer. Our customers will be able to set up their own e-commerce site that looks like the big, popular shopping sites.

We will build a completely new stock trading application with novel features to help traders make better decisions. In addition to all the standard features that users expect, we will add powerful visualization, simulation, and news aggregation features. We expect that our application will become the preferred trading platform for high-net-worth private U.S. investors who trade more than ten different stocks per week.

What is the scope of this project?

We will build an e-commerce engine with a set of features similar to those found on the most popular shopping sites. Our shopping sites will scale up to fit the needs of active small businesses with a few thousand concurrent shoppers.

We will build a new client application that will use existing back-end servers to execute trades and gather data from several sources. The client will provide normal trading features and emphasize three new feature areas: visualization, simulation, and news aggregation.

What development methodology is being used?

We focus on up-front planning and then iterate during in-house development. We emphasize design documents and use them to tightly manage subcontractors.

We use a few XP practices: continuous integration, regression testing, and gradual refactoring. But, that all leads up to a scheduled, major release that must satisfy the initial SRS.

Now that we have a product in the field, we are primarily customer-driven: our process focuses on controlled responses to defects, enhancement requests, and customizations.

See our software development methodology document.

Where should a new team member start?

For more information, see the project proposal.

Please address questions or comments to PERSON-NAME.