on systems analysis

I’m coming to the conclusion that most technically oriented books assume that the requirements already exist and merely need to be converted into ‘use cases’ or even UML diagrams.  And I’m concluding that this is disasterously wrong because it confuses and combines analysis and design as a single step. And because they assume that ‘requirements’ can be stated completely and comprehensively–ignoring all we know about communications in general, which makes sense in that most programmers aren’t much into relating to others (using myself as an example). I’m coming to the conclusion requirements documents are at best skeletal, more like Cliff Notes than War and Peace. So that the real repository of project knowledge lies in certain people’s heads and is expressed orally. 

 

<<dot com is different from internal>>

Puttin’ Petrol Pram

You see huge baby buggies nowadays.  Doubles and buggies with storage compartments and trunks to hold all the crap you need for a baby–and then some.  Heavy duty frames and giantic wheels, sometimes doubled.  SUV and Minivan buggies.  I thought I saw one that was motorized.  It wasn’t but now I’m kind of suprised you don’t see them.  Seeing little tiny Indian nannies puffing to get them up a San Francisco hill, a motorized buggy sounds kind of useful.  Though perhaps its like ancient Greece–if you don’t do the work, you aren’t likely to see the usefulness of labor saving devices.

How much documentation do you need?

How much documentation should you do? When you’re looking for something, why is it always in the last place you look?

Because you stop looking.

How much documentation do you have to write?  Just enough to be understood. And no more.

That is a simplistic statement of course.  It’s hard to know when you’re understood, unlike finding your keys. Being understood is not black and white. And this when you are talking to someone and they can tell you they do not understand or give you that blank look.  When you are writing and you get no feedback you cannot tell at all.  Even though or perhaps because I think of myself as a professional writer, I can guarantee you that if you rely on written documentation alone, you will write both too little and too much to be understood. To the degree needed. By anyone. 

Writing is hard.  You get that.

Reading is hard.  Nobody gets that. Unless we do not understand at all, we all tend to think reading is easy. I am studying Portuguese. I am at the point that when I read a sentence there are some words I ‘know’ the meaning of. But a word in one language is not a matter of subsituting the word, one for one, with another.  And the sentence structures are different.  The nuances, shadings of meaning and intend and allusion are different. It feels like looking through water or fog. And I realize that this is true not just for foreign languages, but for all forms of communication.