228  Blockchain

• Ask the vendors to provide a formal quotation for the product license

and support cost.

• Go through the initial evaluation process based on the vendor profile,

leadership, location, support, benefits, cost and alignment with the

architecture.

• Select a minimum of three prospective products that meet the require-

ments of the business and are aligned to the architecture.

• Start the process to ask the prospective vendors of those products to

showcase the functionalities through POC (proof of concept).

• Go through an unbiased process to evaluate the final product.

• Ask vendors to send license agreement for IOSpeed to legal and pro-

curement teams, so they can review it.

• Sign the contract with the vendors of the selected products.

• Once the hosting provider, blockchain product and other technol-

ogy stacks have been selected, the real development work for the

platform starts.

• The development methodology should be Agile, so a small portion of

the product can be developed in parallel by multiple developers. The

advantage of this approach is that each agile sprint will produce a

feature that can be tested. This also provides a benefit to rule out the

feature if it is not appropriate or will not work, without impacting the

whole development project. In other words, IOSpeed will adopt the

Agile method of development and the whole architecture will reply on

micro services.

• The product development will go through various lifecycles of testing

to create POC and minimum viable products (MVPs).

• Once the end-to-end functionality has been tested through MVP,

it  needs to go through Dev and UAT before the launch of the

product.

• There are various steps that need to be adhered to before launching

the product as general release (GA) or mainstream. The following is

a high-level list:

⚬

⚬Carry out a thorough cyber security review and get certified from

a recognised third-party cyber security company as well as other

associations to improve the confidence level of regulators and

customers.

⚬

⚬Get approval from the regulators to launch the platform. Usually

depending on the jurisdictions of the regulator and in what

country the platform will be consumed, there are various reg-

ulators to get approval from. The recommendation here is to

start the process early enough, so the launch timelines do not

get impacted.