The Design Phase

The design phase culminates with an approved design requirements specification, which records the agreement between the project team, the customer, and key project stakeholders on project deliverables. This milestone offers an opportunity to establish priorities and set expectations, and serves essentially as a contract between the project team and the customer. For some projects, another deliverable of this phase might be a proof-of-concept system that helps the stakeholders and the team understand the application's architecture. Early usability testing is also important.

The following list shows the tasks to accomplish in this milestone.

• Design individual interaction modules.
• Design and document the dialogue flow.
• Test the call flow design using Wizard of Oz tests.

In Wizard of Oz testing the user assumes or believes that they are interacting with a fully implemented system, although in fact all or part of the system is controlled by one or more humans. The interaction is logged and/or recorded for further analysis.

Reaching this milestone means that the project team, the customer and key project stakeholders agree on the following points.

• Priorities of features
• How long it should take to complete the project
• How the product will be built, and who will build it
• Product architecture
• The risks of building the product
• The milestones and deliverables along the way

To	See
Go to the next step.	The Development Phase
Start from the beginning.	The Speech Project Lifecycle
Get more information on gathering the information to create a Design Requirements Specification.	The Planning and Discovery Phase
Get more information on deploying the speech application.	The Deployment Phase
Get more information on optimizing a system after deployment.	The Maintenance and Tuning Phase