Research involves gathering the right information you’ll need to complete your project. No one is an island of information and No one man has all the information needed to sustain his life talk less of satisfying others.
The truth is that all human beings see things from different perspective. My perspective of up might be someone else’s upside down. So keeping in mind that our soft solution will be used by different people with a whole lot of different perspectives, we need research that will bring the views of a whole lot of different people.
Some of the easiest ways to get this kind of information for your solution include (but are not limited to) the following:-
- Try brainstorming with other neutral minded people on this project. They could see the project from dimensions you never imagined.
Brainstorming should be done in a way that the bias if it exists at all is insignificant and the contributor gives his true and creative input. For instance, The extent to which you get true constructive (or Destructive) criticism over an issue differs if your friend or family was criticizing you on one side and some government policy on the other.
- Meeting with Clients - Meetings with clients should be detailed. For each meeting, you must have a clear issue you intend to get an answer; and you must get it. With this new information, brainstorm and have a new meeting till all issues are crystal clear.
It is better to go through this process no matter how painstakingly it goes than providing an incomplete work to the client that makes you look unprofessional with no attention to detail. Most clients forget to tell you everything so you will need to bring it out of them.
To aid these meetings, you could draw up a mock up of your current understanding of the system and have them add, delete or modify the system as you see it until they (the clients) are satisfied. So many open source tools are available for designing soft project models or layouts ( we talk about these in the last part of this series).
- Meeting with Experts - Experts could be people who have probably implemented a similar project or people who are authorities in this field you are working to implement a solution.
Talking with experts gives you the first hand opportunity to see your project from an even more practical side. They have been there and they know at least most of the hurdles there might be.
They are good at advising on the best platform to work on for scalability, The kind of programming paradigm to implement for robustness and could show you bottlenecks you never envisaged.
