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> Most software, and nearly all 'enterprise' or 'business' software should be able to be fully defined and written on paper, by humans, before a single develope
by taborj 9y ago
> Most software, and nearly all 'enterprise' or 'business' software should be able to be fully defined and written on paper, by humans, before a single developer is engaged to translate those requirements to something a computer can run.
This was literally day one of my systems architecture class in college, over 20 years ago. It's probably done more often than you think, but the problem is the workflows change slightly over time, and rather than go back to the drawing board each time, they just tweak the systems software. The result, though, is a mess.
- patentatt 9y agoSurely it's not unheard of, but as a former 'consultant' I would always be amazed that the client hadn't documented their workflow by the time we showed up. We'd usually have a team of BA's work with the client for a few months before code was written, all because the management didn't know how their business ran. Reading between the lines here, it seems that perhaps the IRS is in a similar situation, and the only canonical source of truth for how things work is encoded in the assembler source code.