On Jan 16, 2008 9:28 PM, Darren New <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Bob La Quey wrote: > >> Assuming you (a) have a customer who knows what they want, > > > > Of course you do not have a customer who knows what they want. > > That is one reason why definition is hard and requires a lot > > of face to face. > > Oh, just to clarify the sort of thing I meant when I said the "customer" > might not know what they want, and if they do they might not be able to > tell you: > > In my current job, the original spec went something like this. (Mildly > vague because it's still a couple weeks before we're live and public.)
[snip of system description] LOL, that is a good one. Sounds like fun. A few diagrams would have made all that a lot easier to follow. Not complaining just stating the obvious. Clearly the first task in a situation like that is to build those diagrams and to highlight the areas of greatest ambiguity and risk. One then begins the job of reducing the ambiguity and risk. I doubt that you just started coding. > When you have a nice self-contained build-from-scratch system, it's not > too hard to come up with a spec, then implement to it. That's what I do > all the time, in that situation. One might even believe outsourcing in > such a situation might be worthwhile, if you could figure out which > outsourcing companies were reliable enough to actually implement what > you spec'ed. Figuring that out is not much different then figuring out which of your colleagues are competent. How do you do that? > When you have a full-blown system whose value is in putting together a > bunch of pieces that nobody ever used that way before, it's more than a > bit harder. Yep. In fact what I would say is that your customer has outsourced to you a large and difficult problem. Do you object to that? BTW, does the customer have any programming capability in house? Just curious. They sound like a hedge fund or brokerage firm with a bunch of German quants. BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
