Understanding the E-Commerce Project Cycle

For most e-commerce projects, your best bet will be something with a Waterfall flavor, but with
a bit of changes here or there.

If you have some knowledge about management and a good artistic spirit for web design, the e-commerce project can be a “one man show.� First of all, you need to organize the tasks so that they take place in a logical, sequential order.

Understanding the customer needs should not be difficult. The customer wants an e-store
where a range of products can be advertised and bought. You need to know the type of products
the customer wants on the site and a little about future strategy (today the customer is only
selling balloons, but in the future the customer might want to sell candies). This is very important
because the database and the whole architecture must be designed from the start to support
future changes. You After the data tier is in place, you can continue by building the middle tier of your application.
In the middle tier, you implement the error-handling, data-manipulation strategies and
the business logic for your project.

Most of the customers require artistic and functional design, so, in most cases, the next
phase is creating a web prototype. Whether you do it yourself or hire a web designer, the prototype
should be only a web site template—only HTML code with something like “Product Name
Here� instead of an actual product—without the need of any databases. Depending on the
artistic taste of the customer, you might have to build several prototypes until you agree on a
design. Alternatively, you can create a more complex prototype that has some basic functionality
and even a simple database behind the scenes. The prototype will help you get a feel about
how the final application will work and can help you get some initial feedback from the future
users. With ASP.NET 2.0, you can very easily write simple throwaway interfaces using the new
data-bound controls and data-binding techniques. After you’ve passed the prototypes phase,
it’s time to start implementing the real application.

Designing the database is a critical phase of the project. The logical database
design is developed from the requirements-gathering phase, and is agreed on with the customer.
The logical design of a database describes what data you need to store and the relationships
between different entities of data (such as the relationship between products and departments),
but doesn’t include strict implementation details, such as the associate table used to physically
implement Many-to-Many relationships. If you’re an advanced database designer, you’ll create an
optimal physical database structure yourself.

A number of tools—such as Microsoft Visio—enable you to design the database visually.
These tools have very powerful features for designing relational database structures, and even
generate the SQL code to turn them into real databases. Regardless of the database engine
you’re using, design your tables in a visual way (even with a pen and paper) rather than writing
SQL queries.

If you don’t have resources to buy such an expensive program (yeah, the really professional
ones can be very expensive), you can use Visual Web Developer, which is free and comes
packed with some useful diagramming features.

Next, you implement the data tier objects. This is the place you start playing with your
database because you need to implement the data access logic that will support the other tiers
in your application. In the process, you’ll probably want to populate the database with some
fictive examples to have a base for testing your queries. Before writing the queries as data tier
objects, test them using a visual interface to the database engine that allows executing and
debugging SQL queries. This will make your life easier when debugging the SQL code, because
as all SQL developers know, the code doesn’t always work as you expect it to the first time.

After the data tier is in place, you can continue by building the middle tier of your application.
In the middle tier, you implement the error-handling, data-manipulation strategies and
the business logic for your project.

Building the user interface (the ASP.NET Web Forms, Web User Controls, and Master
Pages) should be the next step. You already have a prototype that is usable only for design,
because at the stage you created the prototypes, you didn’t have a functional foundation.
Usually, interface prototypes in software projects are throwaway code, but the ASP.NET forms
and controls generate the actual look of your web site (with the design the customer agreed on).
A final testing phase is very important at the end of the project. The database will be populated
with real records, and a simulation is made to test the efficiency of the ordering process.
Every process should be tested before going into production, so you must give your customer
enough time to test every functionality of the site, to make some test orders, and to evaluate the
shipping process. During this stage, any programming errors should be revealed for you to
correct.

After the code is ready and tested on your local machine, the next step is to find/provide a
hosting solution. Perhaps the best strategy is to host the project at a specialized provider, and
if the site proves to be successful, the customer can invest in its own hosting solution.