...the fact remains, you cannot build anything of substance, be it a system or otherwise, without a methodology. The question then becomes, how to construct a methodology suitable for your company or a given project. To this end, I offer this tutorial on designing methodologies.
Some programmers consider documentation a waste of time (see “Agile programming”), even going so far as to claim it is detrimental to productivity. Instead of getting all the software specifications recorded on paper at the start, they prefer to begin hacking on the program code and keep modifying it until the end-user is satisfied.
It's a new year, and time to go back to work. January is when we reset the statistics, brace for a new year, and try to prove ourselves once again.
It is important to illustrate most of what goes on in the systems and software world is really not as complicated as people make it. Most of what we do in business is process transactions, representing some sort of action or event, such as a purchase, a return, a back-order, a debit or a credit.
I never really understood the hubbub associated with system design. People tend to look upon it as a complicated process. Actually it's not, yet the corporate landscape is littered with disastrous system projects costing millions of dollars, all because developers overlooked some rather simple principles for design and focused on technology instead.
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