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Overview of the Development Process

Like other forms of software development, configuring Siebel applications is not a completely serial process. During some phases, it makes sense for multiple pieces to be configured concurrently. Furthermore, some tasks—most obviously testing and debugging—are iterative, more like a loop than a straight line. For this reason, it is likely that you will modify the simplified, rather linear process described in this section to suit the needs of your team.

A simplified summary of a typical application development process might consist of the following:

1. Do a thorough business analysis of your organization's and users' needs, and get approval and time and resource commitments from the relevant organizations.
   • Can you meet the needs of your users with a standard Siebel application?
   • If not, what business needs will require changes to the application?
   • How can you assure success with your configured application?
2. Write design documents that include:
   • The requirements that are being satisfied by the configured application.
   • An entity relationship diagram (ERD) or text equivalent of the entity relationships.

     For more information about ERDs, see Working with the Entity Relationship Designer.

   • The names and descriptions of the business objects and business components required for your application, and how they relate to one another.
   • Screen flow diagrams and a list of fields to be displayed on each applet.
   • A description of your development environment and process, for example:
     • How will the work be divided up among participating developers?
     • Naming conventions the development team will be required to use.
     • How will the application be tested and rolled out to users?
   • The complete step-by-step procedures your development and test team will need to follow to complete the application.
3. Have the design reviewed by your participating organizations and users.
4. Set up your application development environment—for example:
   • System and database environment.
   • Developer workstations.
5. Develop the application:
   1. Use Siebel Tools to modify (or create, if necessary) the necessary object definitions:
      • Data objects such as tables, columns, and indexes.
      • Business components and business objects.
      • User interface objects (for example, applets, views, and screens).
   2. Modify Web template files.
   3. Compile your Siebel application and do unit testing.
6. Using the tools available to you in the Siebel application environment (for example, Siebel Assignment Manager and Siebel Business Process Designer), implement the appropriate assignment and workflow rules.
7. If necessary, extend the functionality of your application through scripting (Siebel VB or Siebel eScript).
8. Localize your application if the user interface is to be displayed in two or more languages.
9. Do system and performance testing of your Siebel application.
10. Iterate through the development steps until your design has been fully implemented and your application is running smoothly and meets your performance objectives.
11. Introduce the application to your users and train them.