It will greatly facilitate the process of producing time lines and estimates if you could answer the following questions that apply to your project.

General Questions

• What is the project’s due date, if any?
• How large is your organization (annual revenue)?
• What methodology is preferred for the project (agile or waterfall)?
• What is the budget for the project, if any?
• What level of polish does the project require?
  a) Internal use only (i.e. craigslist.com)
  b) Production minimalist (i.e. gmail.com)
  c) Production polished (i.e. apple.com)
• What is the business need for the project?
• How many different user types will there be and how will their roles differ from one another? Also please provide an example use case for each user type.
• Will this project be built from scratch or is there existing source code to work with?
• Are you open to integration of existing third party open-source components/solutions in order to minimize development time?
• Do you require the project to utilize/function with any specific technologies, frameworks, languages, platforms, devices, etc?
• Will the project require support for any language other than English? If so, what language(s)?
• Is the project a prototype or a full scale version of the product? If prototype, please describe the differences between the prototype and the full scale version.
• Do we need to integrate the application with an external database or an external application? If yes, what databases or applications?
• Will sample data be provided that we can use for testing during development? If yes, what format will be this data in?
• Is there specific business logic that needs to be implemented? If yes, please describe this business logic.
• Please write up a walk through of a user of the system performing the most common task in the system.
• Is there any design work involved like Flash, Images, CSS? If yes, who would be doing that work?

Web Application Specific Questions

• Will the application be static hard-coded HTML or will it contain dynamic features such as web forms that connect to a database?
• What browsers need to be supported?

Mobile Platform Specific Questions

• What mobile platforms need to be supported? What type of application are we building based on the way it connects to the data source?
  a) offline – does not require active internet connection via 3G/WiFi but stores the data locally
  b) online – requires active internet connection to communicate to a web-service
  c) both offline and online
• What content needs to be converted and hard-coded into the mobile application?
• Do you have any considerations/expectations about performance and features versus battery life?
• Are you looking at building a totally custom user interface or utilizing platform-specific user interface standards?

Security

• Are there any specific requirements about security frameworks/models used?
• Do we need to implement encryption? If yes, what specific encryption?
• Do we need to implement user-role based security?

Data Input Features

• How many unique input forms do we need to build?
• How many input fields does each form have?
• Where is the input data stored into, in a database or a local file?
• Do we need to support importing external data? If yes, what file formats do we need to support?

Reporting Features

• How many reports do we need to build?
• What specific formats do the reports need to be exportable in (PDF, CSV, Excel, Word, RTF, TXT, XML)?
• Are there any filtering capabilities required for any of the reports?
• Are there any specific requirements for printing output?

Development Environment

• Are there any requirements for development environment operating system?
• Do we need to work within your development environment or will MentorMate choose the appropriate development environment for this project?
• Do we need to use your Version Control System (VCS) or we will use MentorMate’s development VCS? If we need to use your VCS, what type of VCS is being used? How can we access it?
• Are we going to use your Issue Tracking System (ITS) or can we use MentorMate’s ITS? If we need to use your ITS, what type of ITS ? How can we access it?
• Is a remote desktop to your environment necessary during development? If yes, what are we going to use the remote desktop for?
• It is necessary to use VPN access to your environment during development ? If yes , what type of VPN will we need to access?

Deployment

• Who will be hosting the application, you, a third party, or MentorMate?
• Who will be deploying the application, you or MentorMate?