Hello, I'm joined again by Dr. James from College.
And what we're going to talk about now is how we can move from this abstract idea
into something a bit more concrete.
And we're going to talk about things like what can people do within our thing that
you're going to make.
And how do we define that process, what's the experience going to be like and so on.
Okay, so where do we get started?
How do we sort of make our idea become something which we can
describe clearly to someone else?
>> Yeah, well that process could be summarized as pitching the idea.
Now in order to pitch an idea, you need to start formalizing it.
And by that, I mean, taking it from being an abstract idea and
putting it into a sort of concrete form.
So what do I mean by that?
Well, one of the key processes you can do is something called process analysis.
And what you do is you sit down and you try and
identify the key processes that are gonna be in this piece of software.
>> So these are things that, when you say processes, do you mean if I'm,
from a user perspective, as in things I can do using this piece of software?
>> Absolutely, that's exactly what I mean.
And one of the ways of doing it is literally to identify the different
people that will be involved in the software.
And what are the main things they can do.
>> So let's say we bring up the example of the online house selling website, right?
So one type of person might be an estate agent who
wants to list some houses on there that are for sale, right?
>> Absolutely, absolutely.
And another might be, of course,
a customer who wants to look up those houses.
So there's two key processes.
One is searching for a house and the other is listing a house.
There might be other processes as well.
There might be logging into your account to see what houses have been sent to you.
So what you want to do is identify all the key processes.
And this is sometimes understood as process analysis.
>> And is that a kind of software engineering kind of term,
process analysis?
>> Absolutely.
>> So, something people can look up if they want to read
different ways of doing it?
>> Yes, very much so.
And what I would encourage,
of course, is to look at processes in a very unformalized way.
Sort of say, well for example, if we look at a restaurant.
Obviously there are certain processes that take place that are primary processes.
Cooking the food, taking the money, that kind of thing.
But there are also secondary processes which are also just as important,
like cleaning the restroom.