Making it Happen- from Idea to Implementation and Beyond
David A. Melton
Plexis Group, LLC
8136 Castleton Rd, Indianapolis, IN 46250 U.S.A.
Abstract
In the early stages of developing our Internet-based GIS-enabled road maintenance management application, the specific needs of one user drove our development process. As the project evolved from a client-specific solution to become “eroads”, an application targeted for a wider audience, our design methodology had to shift as well; it became necessary to infer the potential needs of the broader user community from the specific needs of the user for whom the application was initially developed. This inferential, inductive approach can be effective if it is informed by a clear understanding of the data, workflows, and functional needs of the users at all stages of the project. However, this understanding can also lead to the formation of clientspecific biases that may adversely affect product development. As developers attempt to refine the functionality of the product within the new development paradigm, “scope creep” may also occur. Members of the development team should be aware of these potential hazards at all stages of the project. Early recognition of these detrimental influences is essential for timely mitigation. With vigilance, their impact on the project can be minimized.
Project History
White County, Indiana has been one of Plexis Group’s GIS clients for many years. Several years ago, the county decided to migrate their in-house Genamap GIS to an Internet solution hosted and maintained by Plexis Group. In August of 2000, we met with the county highway department to discuss replacing their existing road maintenance tracking software with an application that could be used in conjunction with the county’s new Internet GIS. The county highway department had been using an application called “Roads” to track their road maintenance activities. This application was developed and distributed by the Highway Extension Research Project for Indiana Counties and Cities (HERPICC) at the Purdue University School of Civil Engineering. Now informally called the Indiana Local Technology Assistance Program (LTAP), this program provides technical assistance and training to highway, road, and street departments in Indiana. The latest version of this software was distributed in 1997. Since then, LTAP has discontinued support of the program.
White County was generally satisfied with Roads, but they identified several areas where the application did not meet their needs. The Roads application is built on a DOS-based FoxPro database. Because of the structure of the database, the Roads application did not let the user summarize data for more than one month at a time. For their year-end reports, our client had to create twelve monthly reports and add the totals manually. Our client also needed a better way to estimate the cost of materials in their inventory, especially the gravel and sand in their stockpiles. White County asked us to develop an application that corrected these deficiencies while duplicating the essential functionality of their existing maintenance management system. White County also wanted to link their road maintenance information to the GIS, capitalizing on the spatial nature of their data for future analysis.
Having identified our client’s needs, we began working on a solution in February of 2001. Our first step was to perform a complete functional review of the Roads application, to define the basic functionality we had to duplicate. We also evaluated CarteGraph’s PAVEMENTview and Government Finance Consultants’ CHARTS software, similar solutions from which we hoped to gather ideas for our application. We are fortunate to have a former highway supervisor as a member of our development team. His input was extremely helpful at this stage, as we evaluated which features of these other applications should be included in our own.
To construct a prototype application, we began by importing the road sections, materials, activities, equipment, and employee data tables from Roads into an Access database. Next, we created a data structure for storing work records, linking to the supporting tables whenever possible. We then established the relationships among the tables that would enable us to replicate the functionality of the Roads application. This database prototype was migrated to SQL server, and a Cold Fusion application was developed for data entry, reporting, and modification of the supporting tables. In addition to creating reports similar to those available in Roads, we developed several additional reports suggested by our former highway supervisor.
