Incremental Design

When you are grappling with the complexity of your product, it can be useful to take certain shortcuts so that you can start to see your product "up and running" before it is fully implemented. This section suggests some useful approaches which may help you incrementally design and/or implement your product.

CAUTION:

There is more to getting a product up and running than is described in this guide. This guide covers only the configuration options specific to CER-based products; for other configuration options and initial set-up tasks, see the How to Build a Product guide.

Any short-cuts that you take during the initial development of your product must be recognised for what they are - each short-cut builds up a certain amount of "debt" which must be later repaid. Keep track of which short-cuts you take and plan to place each short-cut with a robust implementation later in your development cycle.

The initial goal of incremental design is to get something up and running for your product, even though it is far from fully implemented. This initial version of your product should be able to have cases created against it and determinations made, but those determinations may show fixed eligibility/entitlement information (which does not take into account the case's circumstances) and no key decision factors or decision details.

These chapters earlier in this document describe how to configure your product. The chapters linked below give details for the full implementation of their respective areas:

Eligibility and Entitlement Calculations
See How to Use It in Calculating and Displaying Eligibility and Entitlement.
Key Decision Factors
See How to Use It in Calculating and Displaying Key Decision Factors.
Decision Details
See How to Use It in Calculating and Displaying Decision Details.