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A Rubric for IT Analysis

Posted by timothy on from the useful-heuristics dept.

Aredridel writes "Zed A. Shaw has an insightful article on how analyses of software systems should be performed, and how they're often done wrong. It should be required reading for all IT journalists, and all readers of IT journals."

4 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Analysis of software systems? by Orion+Blastar · · Score: 5, Informative

    You have to be kidding me. The last three jobs I had, I got dinged if I did analysis of any sort. Most software developers skipped the analysis and design part, because Managers wanted them to start coding on the first day and not stop until it was ready for QA to look it over. I called it "Seat of your pants" programming. Often I had to fix problems in other developers' programs and they did not have proper documentation, source code comments, naming conventions, flow charts, or any sort of documentation to help me figure it out at all.

    Requirements kept comming in, and they changed daily. Often what I started writing at 8am, was useless by 4:45PM when the requirements changed on-the-fly and adhoc and required me to program something else to replace it before I went home for the night. While I could have waited until the requirements were locked in, there was no such thing as that, any idea anyone had was instantly accepted by a manager and given to me to put into the program. Combo boxes became Listvues, then combo boxes again, then a text box, and then a Listvue again, and then a combo box. Database names for tables and columns were always changed, and of the thousands of SQL Queries in my programs that accessed them, they needed to be changed as well.

    Management didn't think anything of it, and kept their "We cannot say no to anyone, no matter how insane the request" attutude.

    Analysis, hooo haaaa! Yeah I wish! Corporate America apparently does not believe in it anymore.

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  2. A rubric is a bit of red text by Colin+Smith · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, really. That's how it started, usually the title of a section, paragraph or similar.

    Obviously the bit of red text contained something someone thought was important so eventually the word came to mean an important rule or important passage. These days it means an important set of rules.

    http://www.dictionary.com/
    htttp://www.m-w.com/
    http://www.askoxford.com/?view=uk

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  3. Re:Now That You Mention It... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
    Indeed and it's follow by an answer. What exatly is you point?
    That pulling fragments of a text out of its context serves to confuse?
    Well, I'm not getting these requirements from some arbitrary place, but from many books on properly displaying statistical data and graphical information. Read any book by Edward Tufte on displaying information, and just about any book on statistics for giving accurate information.

    In addition, I've developed this list after years of reading, writing, and studying studies with these problems. I've even read entire books on so called "performance tuning" which violate all of these basic things. I'm just blown away how someone can write an entire book or article on performance tuning and not mention standard deviation once or show one run chart with a mean and +/- standard deviation lines.
  4. Re:Also the graphs were fine in terms of scaling by T-Ranger · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually, only having two values it is impossible to know how much difference there is. If you test 100 video cards made in the last 5 years, and their scores range from 500-11000, then these two cards are basicly the same speed. If your range is from 1800-1950 then they are radicly different. Numbers are meaningless without units, and units are meaningless if the user doesnt know what they are.