One of the first things I do when starting a new project, or meeting a new client, is to compile a glossary of terms. Each industry has its own jargon, and each business probably has its own spin on that, and a set of short-cuts to concepts that may only make sense once you understand [...]
So how do you work out what you really need? There are as many answers to that question as there are practitioners of the subtle art of requirements gathering. I think it’s important to employ common sense and not adhere to a purely academic approach here. Ultimately you are dealing with software for people, and [...]
Commissioning software is *hard*. Lots of people have lots of potentially conflicting ideas and opinions; you might have a legacy system that does almost what your users want, but not quite; you might want to make use of a new technology, or introduce more automation into the process to drive greater efficiency. How do you [...]
For the last three years, I have been working on a project to bring together all the disparate systems we employ here, to simplify the task of the user and to try and ensure that when someone is off, another person can pick up the threads. Oh, the system was supposed to do much much [...]