Getting into prototyping fleet management software?
January 2, 2010 by
Filed under schedule making software
Hi,
A friend is interested in developing a bit of automation in a small trucking company where scheduling, maintenance, driver availability and truck/haulage tracking is a bit centralized and managed automatically.
Would like to integrate with Google Earth for Geo-Fencing and triggering alarms and so on.
He would like to calculate costs and help to optimize and make the pre-sales process a bit more accurate and painless.
Mostly Microsoft VB and MS Access background, so where should he start?
Sounds like a huge undertaking and an interesting project.
I strongly believe that a sound system analysis is needed to draw a roadmap for developers to do their work. I might weigh the importance as 70% for analysis and 30% for development.
Requirements definition is the place to start, and then detailed analysis of each one. This will greatly help in the final functional design and how all functions will integrate together and exchange data. The functional design will dictate the optimum RDBS design.
Now, I don’t know much about Google Earth APIs and what’s needed to integrate that functionality with the system, but that’s an area that needs to be plugged into the system and accommodated in the analysis phase, even when its development is not planned for the next few versions.. Some further research is needed in this area.
Once all requirements are defined, you can then make cost and timeline projections.