Programming is hard

Not only do you have to work out how to make the thing, but you need to understand the business process too, and understand what the user really means. It’s not enough to simply join databases to forms and bash out lines of SQL; there’s a requirement to understand what’s going on in the user’s head. Why is it important that their “Sales Order Report” has a “Sales Line Reference” on it? What is a “Sales Order Report” anyway? Who makes them and what are they used for?

Without understanding the way the user works, you can’t write their software.

So beware the next time someone says “can you make me a new stock system” since it’s not just a bunch of databases joined to a form. That’s like saying a human body is simply a bag of goo that moves on its own. Writing software is easy, the problems have all been solved and are hiding in Google somewhere, ready for you to find. The hard part is working out what the users are going on about.

Just how, with rigorously tracked stock levels where everything is accounted for, down to the last widget, do you cope with “well sometimes people just walk in and buy stuff with cash, and we don’t run it through our books because it’s not worth the effort”? Business processes are what happen when groups of people come together and try to gain the upper hand on each other, it’s not a neat well-defined system you can pack into a box and label “selling widgets”.

It’s fun though. There’s comms hardware out there that communicates using port 6666 because I randomly chose it one night.

Tags: blog365, Programming, software design