Re: Stupid software requirements - need your examples
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:01:18 -0300
Message-ID: <AANLkTinJ6vP9rGA3CkJN4WF8-5OVOT3wqLAOrQKgrh_M_at_mail.gmail.com>
Well, I mostly find it annoying when a certain app is only certified to run with Oracle 8 (or even 7) and lately 9i and you know it will bring you a lot of grief if something should go wrong. While it's true that Oracle has changed a lot since the 8i days, it's also true that if the application is designed correctly it should work (perhaps not perform as well) in any version of the database (again, 8i and up).
In any case, I'd very much rather the application be database agnostic altogether, but that seems not to happen with most applications.
Vudu parameters: When as part of the requirements for an application you get something like "set <obscure parameter> to <some value>" without a proper documentation of WHY and how it was tested.
I don't know if this is what you mean
cheers
Alan.-
On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 11:16 AM, Gints Plivna <gints.plivna_at_gmail.com>wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I'm quite sure most of you at least once have been in a situation when
> you HAD TO implement a requirement, which is stupid, results in slow
> performance and in principle cannot be optimized. And you either
> silently or loudly blamed the person who could imagine something like
> that :)
>
> So (as I'm actually mostly system analyst) I'm seeking examples for a
> small presentation to highlight such cases for my colleagues to avoid
> them. I know quite many developers blame requirements gatherers and
> system analysts for these requirements and they are right, because
> such requirements should not be accepted or at least customer has to
> be informed about the consequences.
>
> OK and now a few cases to encourage your imagination:
> 1) Paging through unlimited ordered search results. I've seen quite
> many cases when search form is abused to statistics report and after
> searching for something one gets records 1-20 out of 564653.
> 2) Various statistical information in an entry form that should be
> calculated on the fly. For example We have 8767769 questions, 32490
> topics, 325489 users and 1233 active users. Who the hell care?
> 3) Searching for arbitrary substring, i.e. LIKE %whatever%.
> 4) Logging each transaction for a time-consuming process. For example
> a banking app should log every operation for the month closing
> process, which analyses each transaction for each client in the
> previous month.
> 5) Requirement to synchronize every single transaction with other
> systems. Also an example from banking world - bank app is calculating
> journal entries and synchronizing each one with card system.
>
> If you don't want to tell them in public with your name, you can drop
> me a private e-mail and I will later publish summary without any names
> of course.
>
> TIA
>
> Gints Plivna
> http://www.gplivna.eu
> --
> http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>
>
>
-- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Thu Feb 17 2011 - 09:01:18 CST