Stupid software requirements - need your examples
- From: Gints Plivna <gints.plivna@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Oracle L <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:16:32 +0200
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
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