The scratchpad application we built in the previous chapter is a Qt project, represented by a .pro file. In a business environment, technical solutions are generally developed as part of company initiatives, and these initiatives are generally also called projects. To try and minimize confusion (and the number of times the word project appears!), we’ll use project to mean a Qt project defined by a .pro file and the word initiative to refer to projects in the business sense.

The initiative we will work on will be a generic client management system. It will be something that can be tweaked and re purposed for multiple applications—for a supplier managing customers, a health service managing patients, and so on. It will perform common tasks found over and over in real-world Line of Business (LOB) applications, principally adding, editing...