> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rich Kulawiec
> Sent: Friday, November 27, 1998 4:42 PM
> ... Software? Cheap and getting cheaper,
> especially if you use as much freeware as possible.
Where, pray tell, does one get a freeware program to handle $10 billion
worth of futures trading on SE Asia markets? Or would you have to go
to shareware for that one? How about the program to coordinate
international money transfers with exchange rate trends for 200 different
currencies? I'll bet you'd have to go to shrink-wrap s/w there.
> Set up the new stuff in parallel ... test the hell out of it, make
> the new UI asymptotically close to the old one
How do you know what the old stuff does? It is tens of thousands of
programs, scattered all over the company, with user and code documentation
that is at best out of date, more likely completely missing. The UI is
probably mostly 3270-based for that fraction of the programs that are
interactive, and is printer output for the majority of it.
> ... (Yes, I have actually done this, on a live network
> with 60K users. It worked. No big deal.)
I suspect that what you did involved replacing the network, DBMS, and
OS portions of the system, leaving the applications code intact.
Essentially a black-box replacement, transparent to the higher levels.
The applications code in a system like this is several orders of
magnitude larger and more complex than the sum total of the OS, comms,
network, and DBMS software.
> Nope. No army. Trying to attack this problem with an army would
> be mistake #1. A relatively small group would have a much better
> shot at it.
Ok, we're probably talking about 50-100 million lines of applications
code here. There's probably a lot of it that's redundant or unused, so
eliminating that and using the best modern techniques of OO, 4GL, code
generation, etc, you probably only have to write 30 million new lines.
Suppose your programmers are all as good as the best business system
programmers, capable of churning out 30,000 lines of code a year.
With 13 months left until 2000, and allowing no time at all to find
out what the old stuff does, design the new system, integrate and
test, you need only 900-some programmers. Piece of cake.
Bob Munck
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