The New York State-Local Internet Gateway Prototype development was conducted in three distinct stages: the first focused on the refinement of the idea of a gateway and the selection of applications to be included in the Prototype. The second stage was the actual development of the Prototype (comprising the overall Gateway and three business applications), and the final stage consisted of testing, refinement, and technical support for the field testers. During these three stages the project participants were organized into specialized teams,worked with software development teams from CGI and Keane, and tested the Prototype.

The goal of Phase One was to select several business process applications and decide which features would be included as parts of the Gateway Prototype. In order to consider an application for the inclusion in the Gateway Prototype, it had to meet several criteria.

• Its business process had to encompass more than one level of government.
• It had to be small enough so that it could be built within our time frame, but it had to be comprehensive enough to answer the questions of interest.
• It had to already exist in some form.
• The data to be used in the application had to be readily available and accessible.

In order to develop the applications successfully, a prototype team of state and local professionals was established and divided into subgroups for selected applications. These groups consisted of people whose daily job functions included portions of the business process of that particular application. Members needed to be able to dedicate time to the project and provide specialized knowledge to the development process.

The groups developed scope statements for each application which reflected their understanding of the requirements for both the application and this new kind of intergovernmental work. They also developed high-level process maps and data flows for each of the applications and identified which part of the full process would be the target for the Prototype.

In the second phase, conceptual work was given to corporate partner developers. They were provided with only general guidelines for software development (such as the need for the Gateway Prototype to be accessible through a standard Web browser, to be accessed via a dial-up line, to be intuitive, etc.). The actual coding standards for software development were left to corporate partners' expertise and discretion.

Corporate partner software developers held several joint application development sessions (JAD) with the Prototype Team. The purpose of the JAD sessions was to further define and clarify the components and requirements of each of the applications. During this phase, CTG staff acted as a liaison between corporate and government partners to facilitate the process and reduce the workload of the government teams. After the JAD sessions, corporate partners developed applications, reviewed them with the Prototype Team, and fine-tuned them.

The third phase consisted of testing and supporting the now finished Gateway Prototype. The Prototype was subjected to two rounds of user acceptance testing before it was made available for the field test. In the first user acceptance test, the Gateway Prototype was examined and tested by the CTG staff. The second user acceptance test was conducted by both state and local members of the Prototype Team. After each test, refinements and modifications took place as necessary.