Best Practices For Legal Extranet Software Development Teams

Teams developing legal deal rooms or legal extranets should strongly consider adapting a set of software development best practices or application development methodologies.

One such example of this is the Rational Unified Process (RUP). While it is impossible to describe this entire process in a blog, it is comprised of four broad steps: Inception Phase, Elaboration Phase, Construction Phase, Transition Phase. The RUP also encourages development teams to gather business requirements, understand business needs and goals, develop a project budget and timeline, ask clients to review and approve business requirements documents, write functional specifications, prepare a project timeline, develop and use a testing plan to ensure quality within the application, use proper change management methodologies to deploy the application to a production environment, and to document the technical aspects of the system post deployment.

When teams follow these steps, quality and client satisfaction are sure to dramatically improve.