We've gone through so many development iterations I can't keep up on the version number anymore. Every week something new flies into the picture and we alter the specifications to match the need. Last month we began our second major development spurt, so I thought this would be an ideal time to jot down a few notes about some of the things that have become more and more important as we require our application to handle an ever increasing amount of data:

Scalability
No matter what stage you're at in the development process, always remind your developers about the scalability the product needs to achieve and verify that the tools you're using are a good match. Scalability is not easy to predict all the time, but if you can work backwards you'll figure it out. You want to determine the amount of data your application will be handling, on average, and at peak times. Below are some questions that can help you get started:

• How many users will the application be serving/supporting (desktop vs. server)?
• How much data will each user be producing each day?
• What is the maximum amount of data that your application will need to handle?
• What is the maximum amount of time you're willing to have the end-user wait while information is loading/being processed? Can you do the data processing while the user is sleeping/not in the office?

Check Points
At what point should your developers ask for authorization to move forward on the specs? What must be done before they can move forward? Don't just clarify this on paper, but have a conference to make sure you're understood. If you're bootstrapping, ever dollar matters and things always change. You don't want to pay developers to build something you're going to have scrap.