Re: Stupid software requirements - need your examples

From: Subodh Deshpande <deshpande.subodh_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 20:43:24 +0530
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=betAN+_WaZ77VbYC9Ggh4zC-G2XYuzvcSQcjs_at_mail.gmail.com>

apart from this story you may get cartoons of building a railway track and building a cradle on tree these are classic example of understanding requirement analysis

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
>
>
>

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Received on Thu Feb 17 2011 - 09:13:24 CST