Re: What is analysis?

On Dec 2, 4:23 pm, "David Cressey" <cresse..._at_verizon.net> wrote:
>
> I'm hesitant to offer a definition off the top of my head, because it will
> surely be torn apart by the usual gang of vultures.

What, here in c.d.t.? Noooo, that can't be right. :-)

> In the meantime, I'd
> like to hear from everybody with a degree in software engineering. Did you
> ever take a course on analysis?

I have a bachelors in CS from UC Berkeley. Never took a class in analysis. Never really heard of it until the last 5 years or so.

> Or, alternatively, did you ever take a course on methodologies
> that put a strong emphasis on analysis?

Never took any methodology course.

> Have any of you ever undertaken a large scale database
> design project without doing any formal analysis, or just
> by writing down the requirements in a doc?

Well, at my last job, most of what I did over the years involved working with this one big database. It had roughly 75 tables when I started, and many hundreds when I left. Data size in terabytes; revenue in billions.

Since I don't know what analysis is, I don't know whether I did any or not. :-) However it was pretty rare that I ever actually did anything so heavyweight as to write down requirements in a doc. Usually I just thought about what was needed and wrote code.

There were two other large scale projects I worked on, in a role that I guess could be called "chief architect" or some such thing. In both cases I did all the schema design myself, not wanting to leave this part to junior engineers. I did my designs by writing DDL in vi.

> What happened after that?

Uh, worked fine?

The big problems tended to be rapidly changing requirements. (Not that we misunderstood the requirements in the first place, but rather they changed after the initial design.) Oh, and Sarbanes-Oxley.

Marshall Received on Mon Dec 03 2007 - 08:40:01 CET