RE: Stupid software requirements - need your examples
- From: Jackie Brock <J.Brock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "gints.plivna@xxxxxxxxx" <gints.plivna@xxxxxxxxx>, Oracle L <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2011 16:49:00 -0700
For me, my pet peeve is the use of a values constraint (as a requirement!)
rather than a foreign key, when the values will change. In several instances,
I ended up having to alter tables numerous times (as predicted), rather than
simply adding a row to a lookup table.
Another example is one I inherited. I got a job at a company that had had a
requirement that all constraints be enforced by the application rather than in
the database. Unfortunately, the previous "DBA" had very little experience
with databases. This might not have been a problem had she used the
application for data work. She did not. I spent the first YEAR of my
employment at that company cleaning up bad data; orphans, values that made no
sense, entities that nobody could identify... To this day, there are mysteries
in the database that have not been resolved.
One other example, and I'll quit ranting. This one still rankles me - I was
supposed to create a PowerPoint presentation using data that was stored in the
database. Rather than accessing the data directly, though, there was a
requirement that I pull the data from Excel spreadsheets that were created from
the database "because they were already known to be correct and accurate". So
the process took several times longer than it should have taken - creating the
initial spreadsheets took at least an hour; then the spreadsheets had to be
parsed, followed by other steps that would not have been necessary had I simply
been able to pull the data directly from the database. Ironically, the
spreadsheets have since proven to be less than accurate in fulfilling their
original requirements, so the code that generates the presentation must now
compensate for the inaccuracies. *sigh*
-Jackie
Jackie D. Brock
Database Specialist - Systems Evaluation
CableLabs(r)
858 Coal Creek Circle
Louisville, CO 80027
Email: j.brock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
303-661-3347
-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Gints Plivna
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2011 7:17 AM
To: Oracle L
Subject: Stupid software requirements - need your examples
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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