Development of large systems using the older Waterfall methodology can take years from project inception to the time that even a single department benefits from the investment.

Rather than spending months generating requirements and interviewing masses of end-users at once for a "big bang" project, our iterative approach allows for many phases of requirements gathering, each iteration focusing on the most important system requirements at that time.

Systems implemented using older methodologies would accurately reflect the world "as it was" several years ago, and frequently end up being between partially and completely useless when actually delivered.

With our methodology, you get a functional product very quickly, and you can market your product, gain ROI, and improve the PR of your development team, even if the project is only partially implemented. Using the Pareto principle (80/20 rule), we ensure the greatest value functionality is delivered first. The more costly and less critical functionality can be investigated later in the project, to verify that those pieces are still worthy of effort.

Additionally, our Object-Oriented methodology allows us to reduce system complexity by breaking down larger systems into smaller and smaller pieces that are very easy to understand, and thus develop more rapidly, with fewer bugs. A side effect of this modular design is that future features can be integrated without disturbing the whole.

Final products of this stage include a prioritized system use case model, non-functional requirements (A non-functional requirement is a characteristic or constraint that might limit our choice of technology when we implement one or more functional requirements.), baseline feature point analysis count, acceptance criteria, software architecture documentation, risk list, and a development plan.