Re: Stupid software requirements - need your examples

I remember one incident, I was gatheing some information and my boss told me a joke, I will share with all of you.

There is organisation that is doing a business, once there marekting representative is on field and grabs the order without looking into much details of it. According to the order from top to bootom everybody get involved and they start working on it.. The order is unique and core of the organisation also take the cognizanace of the same and prasies all who are involved. The progress is informed to the client and client says we now want to visit and actually want see who are doing our work

Client arrvies for a visit, appreciates the efforts and remarks you are missing our prime requirement we want this to be developed by a couple (male, female) and want to give this product as a gift to the first child of this couple, if you can not fullfil you will have to stop the work...we give you some time frame of say another 12 months to 18 months considering your efforts and integrity..

The organisation starts searching for a couple (male, female), they could not get a sutiable couple. To not to loose the customer everybody starts working on it...as if the product is of their own.. They start thinking in many ways..funny ideas to appear like what if if we give one male and eight females or vice versa or any combination of these etc..as some of them feels they can not become good parents ...and then new creative option arises what if we adopt a orphan from outside and present this as the baby of any of these couples etc...and we will further we will inform some more infformation about thier marriage, honneymonn etc...

In all these things the main focus of everybody is lost the product remains half way and neither they could get a couple too nor a product too..where as customer was aware of that it requires minimum one male and one female with healthy relations of one year between both of them so that new child can be born provided both are ready to become parents.

the organisation looses the order finally..customer searches for some one else..

thanks..subodh

On 17 February 2011 19:46, 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
>
>
>

-- 
==============================
DO NOT FORGET TO SMILE TODAY
==============================

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l