About Polyphony

Powerpoint Presentation

For a Powerpoint presentation about Polyphony and how it changes design, click here.

Understanding Business Applications

The principle behind Polyphony is that understanding a business IT application's functionality is about understanding three elements.

1. Processing. What screens they are, what they do, and how tasks work together to create business processes.
2. Information. Commercial IT applications are largely about capturing, storing and providing information.
3. Users. How the screens are packages into user interfaces, what user roles can do which tasks, and what data is used by which users.

What is key, is understanding the relationships between these three elements.

Why use Polyphony

There are many reasons why using a Polyphony model is preferable to other traditional approaches to describing a business application's functionality. We will highlight a few.

• The diagrams are attractive and neatly summarize the functionality. In most diagrams, you can click on shapes in the diagram to show more or less information.
• One of the diagrams runs script. As each step is taken, new data is added to the diagram in the right place. This is ideal for developing self-teaching tutorials or for highlighting specific points about how the design works.
• The diagrams and the reference text are generated from the model data. Thus, there is no effort required for drawing the diagrams other than adding model data. Furthermore, reference text and diagrams are guaranteed to be in sync.

Analysing applications

One of the thoughts behind the development of Polyphony was that we need to analyse application functionality. If the application already exists, we analyse them to improve them. If the application is in design, we analyse it to ensure the application's functionality is consistent, complete and practicable. Polyphony diagrams provide an ideal talking point during an application walk through, not only because they are attractive, but also because of their ability to expand detail or to draw a new diagrams focused on a selected element in the diagram. You can explore the system through diagrams.