🚀 go-pugleaf

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. 

We have a customer (who shall remain nameless) who has asked us to
build a fairly large-scale simulation of their facility. The problem
is that this customer just recently inherited the role of running the
facility when they won the contract to do so. While many employees
transferred, many left. Because of this, they aren't very familiar
with the operational logic of their operation. The facility is largish
(> 4000 employees), but the high employee turnover means that much
experience has been lost. We have been told, in fact, that there
simply isn't anyone left who can explain operations at a functional
specification level of detail.

To compound this problem, the customer has assigned a freshly-degreed
(inexperienced) person as our primary point of contact. This person
has no real-world software engineering experience, is completely
unfamiliar with top-down design methodologies, object-oriented design,
or software requirements documentation.  Naturally, therefore, this
person is attempting to impose a design methodolgy upon us that goes
like this:


(Customer speaking)
"We don't know how our facility works, and so we can't supply you with
requirements and functional specifications. Further, we don't know
what data we will want the model to capture for us, so we want you
[us] to design the model to capture 'everything'. And, since we don't
know how to do anything else yet, we want to design the output data
post-processor first."


Now, lest you think I'm making all of this up, I'll include a
paragraph from the customer's "requirements" document for the model's
post processor:

"With the current design, the analyst running the simulation is not
required to foresee which information he/she will want to analyze. A
detailed history of all material, processes, equipment, personnel,
[...], and storage is kept during the simulation. The analyst, using
the post processor, has the flexibility to manipulate and analyze any
data from any of the history information kept from that simulation. If
the analyst wants to produce a Master [...] Schedule (monthly totals
of production), observe actual daily operations, as well as
analyze bottlenecks, he/she has the flexibility and is only required
to run one simulation.

The post processor is intended to be user friendly as well as
flexible, using pop-up menus and prompts to guide the user."


Sigh.

What we need are requirements and functional specifications
documentation; what we are getting is a bottom up design
specification.


--Doug
--

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Douglas Roberts                |
Los Alamos National Laboratory |I can resist anything
Box 1663, MS F-609             |  except temptation.
Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545   |  ...
(505)667-4569                  |Oscar Wilde
dzzr@lanl.gov                  |
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