Presents a dozen categories of the author s top tips to assist you, both in learning Oracle Designer and in applying it to a system development process. These tips concentrate on the analysis and design tools that are used most frequently. ...

Design tools like Oracle Designer, however, have a steeper learning curve because the tool is tied closely to whatever methodology you choose for designing and producing your system. Therefore, you must be certain of the plan you will follow to develop the system before you determine how you use the tool to support that plan. Oracle Designer is flexible enough to fulfill the needs of diverse system development strategies. Coupled with its extensibility and API (Application Programmatic Interface), one could argue that it is capable of supporting virtually any system methodology.

• How many repositories will you use?
• How will developers be partitioned into different repositories and application systems?
• How will definitions be shared or transferred between application systems?
• Will you follow a traditional partitioning scheme by having separate application systems for Development, Test, and Production?
• Will you use Oracle Designer-generated prototypes to show the users so they can get used to what the generators can produce (and not expect much more)?
• What depth will you go into the repository to support your system development?
• What are your critical success factors for each phase of the life cycle?
• How will you know that each development phase is complete?
• How much user involvement will you have in your project?