This last post in the series is to describe a few more details around the Storyboard Designer application I am building.  Storyboard Designer is targeted at Power Users and/or Business Analysts (BAs) to enable a quick way to design and construct custom business user interfaces, which will in turn become business applications. The application will allow for the design and construction of workflows, business rules and data access associated with these user interfaces.  This is done so in a storyboard fashion similar to what has been successfully done in the film industry for over sixty years.

 

Whats different about Storyboard Designer than other storyboard type applications?  From a marketing perspective it is targeted at business Power Users and/or BAs tasked with defining the requirements and specifications for a custom business application, including the UI, workflow, business rules and data access.  The idea is that requirements become specifications as defined (read: modeled) by the BA using the designer.  Since we are using XAML, the resulting specifications become the implementation.  Key point.

 

Storyboard Designer has a drawing canvas that will allow the organization of businesses and business applications.  A Power User can drag and drop UI components onto a canvas to build a user interface in XAML.  Storyboard Designer will offer catalogs of composite UI parts that are commonly used in business applications, plus the capability to reuse complete user interface definitions for common business objects like Invoices, POs and any other set of forms for that matter, built or purchased, all XAML.

 

One design goal is to ensure the BA can define (read: design) a business application using Storyboard Designer without writing any code.  Or at the very least meet the 80/20 rule.  Another goal is to provide an intuitive drawing tool that will allow the BA to specify (and as a result, implement) a business application in the shortest time possible.

 

Toolboxes of components will represent real world business application constructs, for example, an invoice form, people interacting with the invoice form in a workflow, invoice form business rules and invoice form data, all need to be easily specified (i.e. drawn) on the canvas.  In addition, objects need to be configured and hooked together to represent a real world business application.

 

Using XAML, we can more easily come up with a 3D virtual world that represents these objects in a way that dozens or even hundreds of user interface screens (plus associated roles, workflow, business rules and data for those screens) can be easily navigated to on the canvas, as thumbnails.  Clicking on any thumbnail will zoom the object to screen for editing.  Those that have played with the workspace zoom in Expression Interactive Designer will know what I mean as an analogy.  XAML will provide, layering, zoom capabilities and levels of transparency to show the connections to the various objects without the screen real estate becoming overwhelming or cluttered.  Look at how Google Earth or Virtual Earth is displayed essentially on one canvas using layers and zoom.  AutoCAD works in a similar way.  Storyboard Designer will implement similar concepts except we are looking at a map or CAD blueprint of a custom business application from a 3D drawing perspective.

 

Over the coming months I will put together a prototype of Storyboard Designer based on the specs described in this series.  I will come back to this topic when something is built.

 

The purpose of this ten part series was to discuss industrializing parts of the software development process we use to design and construct business software.  Storyboard Designer is my small contribution to industrializing software.  I have been in the software development business for 15 years and one conclusion I have come to is that the state of the art of developing software today is still trial and error most of the time.  Further, rarely does what we build meet what the business user actually required.  This is the semantic gap between requirements (i.e. the intent of the business application) and the executables (i.e. the ruin-time business application).  Talk about lost in translation!

 

Storyboard Designer provides the capability for business Power Users and/or BAs to easily draw business applications using a 3D visualization tool with the output being the actual executables for a custom business application.  Not only does the tool close the large semantic gap between requirements and executables, more importantly the tool can be used by the very people that know everything there is to know about their own business and what the business application is supposed to automate.  As a result of these tool capabilities, the time frame for designing and constructing business applications is dramatically reduced and on its way to becoming a predictable and repeatable process for delivering business applications that actually meet business user requirements.

 

Lets see if I can make this real