Inception Phase

In Inception Phase the business case which includes business context, success factors (expected revenue, market recognition, etc), and financial forecast is established.

To complement the business case, following deliverables are generated:

• A basic use case model;
• Project plan;
• Initial risk assessment; and
• Project description (the core project requirements, constraints and key features).

After the above mentioned are completed, the project is checked against the following criteria:

• Stakeholder concurrence on scope definition and cost/schedule estimates.
• Requirements understanding as evidenced by the fidelity of the primary use cases.
• Credibility of the cost/schedule estimates, priorities, risks, and development process.
• Depth and breadth of any architectural prototype that was developed.
• Actual expenditures versus planned expenditures.

Following are the engineering disciplines followed in this phase of the project lifecycle

• Business Modeling Discipline

  Organizations are becoming more dependent on IT systems, making it imperative that information system engineers know how the applications they are developing fit into the organization. Businesses invest in IT when they understand the competitive advantage and value added by the technology.

  
  

  The aim of business modeling is to first establish a better understanding and communication channel between business engineering and software engineering. Understanding the business means that software engineers must understand the structure and the dynamics of the target organization (the client), the current problems in the organization and possible improvements. They must also ensure a common understanding of the target organization between customers, end users and developers.

  Business modeling explains how to describe a vision of the organization in which the system will be deployed and how to then use this vision as a basis to outline the process, roles and responsibilities.

  
  
• Requirements Discipline

  The goal of the Requirements is to describe what the system should do and allows the developers and the customer to agree on that description. To achieve this, analysts elicit, organize, and document required functionality.

  
  

  If the project does not pass this milestone, called the Lifecycle Objective Milestone, it can either be cancelled or it can repeat this phase after being redesigned to better meet the criteria.