Re: What is analysis?
Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:33:29 GMT
Message-ID: <tf15j.92949$cD.57998_at_pd7urf2no>
David Cressey wrote:
> I had thought that all software engineers were familiar with what analysis
> is, and how it differs from design. But perhaps not. There have been a
> couple of basic questions in this newsgroup, from people that seem like
> serious professionals, that suggest that analysis itself is widely
> misunderstood.
>
>
> Given the number of large projects that have begun with inadequate analysis,
> and have ended in disaster over the last decade, perhaps there's a
> widespread ignorance of the fundamentals of analysis.
>
> 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. In the meantime, I'd
> like to hear from everybody with a degree in software engineering. Did you
> ever take a course on analysis? Or, alternatively, did you ever take a
> course on methodologies that put a strong emphasis on analysis?
>
> 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? What happened after that? I'm not talking about a little
> database with 20 or 30 columns. I'm talking a database with upwards of 300
> columns and a good number of tables.
>
>
>
>
Sorry, I wrote my little tome about analysis under the wrong thread. I was trying to emphasize that to me your question involves asking what are the requirements for analysis. I suspect they are just more specific examples of the requirements for purposeful thought if one were to ask what are the requirements for that. Also I would like to explain that when I mentioned "pat questions", I was including questions one constantly asks oneself, they might be the most important.
No degree, but based on the 70's, 80's and 90's when I haunted university bookstore wherever I went in order to see what the curricula included, I'd say most of the methodology training occurred in a commercial setting, except for the early confusing of structured programming with structured design and the later, phony, higher-education escapades where faculty were fooled into imagining that OO programming must have an analysis and design counterpart.