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Ten Considerations for Application Design and Development

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  • Ten Considerations for Application Design and Development

    ** This thread discusses the article: Ten Considerations for Application Design and Development **
    ** This thread discusses the Content article: Ten Considerations for Application Design and Development **
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  • #2
    Ten Considerations for Application Design and Development

    ** This thread discusses the article: Ten Considerations for Application Design and Development **
    Great article and good information. Everyone should do what you described. I'm no longer in IT, but I used to work as a consultant who designed and wrote countless large and small applications. I still remember many of the companies I had to visit. Lots of home grown applications were horrible and so were some of the people I had to deal with. In fact, I think it is safe to say that you can't have a horrible nest of applications in common use without having a group of horrible IT professionals nearby. For example, interrelated systems with completely different field sizes and attributes, Even dates were alpha in some and numeric in others, not to mention different date layouts ... this was at one company under the same roof on the only AS/400 in house. I still recall arguing about oversizing fields on custom and new applications just to accommodate a potential change in business practice without needing to recode ... and loosing those arguments. (example: "Our Account numbers are all 4 digits and will never be anything else!!!")The clients assumed I was difficult. This was a somewhat common problem over the years. (Both the oversize field argument and the clients opinions of me when I tried to introduce classical, good design and proactive thinking.) Or the IT manager who refused to let me meet with Payroll and HR about a coming 401k provider conversion I was designing and coding for. Unions were involved and the new provider handled accounts substantially different. File layouts and other specs were withheld to teach me a lesson for being an uppity consultant. I'm not kidding. These people were nuts. I never finished ... or even started ...that project, having been sent home for being difficult about a week before cut-over ... I was politely insisting on normal, sane working conditions. That company is now about 20% of its former size, having been split out to other divisions of the parent or shut down. I could probably write a long article about some of the incredible stupidity I ran into while consulting. However, I would probably be sued due to confidentially agreements I signed over the years. I guess what I am trying to say is that good design and forethought does not exist in a vacuum. IT can not do it alone, no matter how good it is. But a company needs good IT creativity and practice to prosper.

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