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Development

The "Development" phase includes application development, quality assurance/testing and data conversion and integration. The development phase of the I-GIS is a future consideration for the team. Currently there is no need for these strategies if the I-GIS is properly maintained.

Application Development

Currently there are no specifically designed applications for the user community. The Medicinal Plants Project may possibly require an application in the future.

Quality Assurance

 

Quality assurance is defined as "a set of procedures designed to ensure that quality standards and processes are adhered to and that the final product meets or exceeds the required technical and performance requirements". Quality assurance is used to improve upon product delivery and meeting community requirements and expectations. The I-GIS team is responsible for these quality standards. None exist at the moment, except for the metadata standards. These standards are extremely important to maintain.

Conversion and Integration

The conversion and integration strategies are fundamental for the I-GIS. Currently resource constraints and future uncertainty, both in financial terms and in user development needs, make it difficult to set any strategies for migration. These strategies, (such as upgrading from ArcGIS to a new GIS platform or to a central server) need to be completed and recorded properly before changes are made.

Deployment

The "Deployment" phase covers systems installation, application functional testing, performance testing and user training. None of these, except for user training apply to the I-GIS at the moment. The support section provides various user training options including "how to" documents and frequently asked questions.

Maintenance

The "Maintenance" phase provides information on how to successfully maintain, monitor, tune and obtain support and services for the I-GIS.

Support

The best support available for much of the I-GIS needs can be found at the ESRI Support Centre. The following is a list of resources available at the Support Centre.

Knowledge Base ESRI database of known bugs, common error messages, technical articles, white papers, and system requirements Downloads The latest software updates, patches, bug fixes, samples, user contributed ArcScripts, and evaluation software User Forums Community of GIS professionals where you can browse and post focused questions, or actively help others. Our own GIS forum is the I-GIS International Advisory Group - ask us about joing if you'd like to belong. For Developers Developer specific documentation, samples, downloads, object models, etc.

 

Systems Maintenance

To successfully maintain the I-GIS and manage the integration of new technology with existing production environments the I-GIS team has a great challenge. This will require starting the process of the project lifecycle over again in most cases.

Software Maintenance

Updates and service packs for the I-GIS need regular installations to keep the system up to date.