>>>>>< rof, l> and < lol >!!! This kinda reminds me of one of my favorite clients. I love the guy to pieces, but he fancies himself as a hobby programmer becuase, before I wrote his new system, he wrote the original DOS system in Q&A.
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>>>A hobby programmer..... truly scary ! I worked for a place sometime back where the Director of Accounting did the same thing. Played around with code and basically messed things up. I remember sitting down and talking with him about how we need to get double vision ( unix screen sharing program ) so I can catch the idiot who's changing code and making my life hell. Come to think of it now.... we never did get that software !
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>>>:)
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>>>Don
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>>You wanna know scary hobby IT personel. I once went to work for a bank that did mortgages, on their loans origination project. They had been taken over by a larger bank, and the mortgage "clerky" people had been dubbed "systems analysts", some 2 years before I joined. I sussed they didn't know their @ass from a hole in the ground when I found them planning the system bottom-up from a customer details input screen (hadn't even defined waht data they needed). One guy I worked closely with, just to test him, I pulled aside the metal slide on a floppy disc, exposing the brown disc inside, and said to him "Look at the data on this disc". And he LOOKED!
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>I'd have to say that starting from the screens / forms isn't such a bad way of developing a system. Its going to help you consider what data you need to capture.

You don't quite understand. They had an off-the-peg American loans origination system, called Bancstar, and were working their way from its initial screen upwards, making up their own. Now, the US mortgage system works differently from ours, so the the system would have needed to be tailored anyway, and it worked in a sort of reverse polish internal language, that would have been nigh-on impossible to debug and maintain, the input screens demanded certain fields that aren't germane to UK fileds, probabbly missing out several that are, and they were going to work their way upwards from that.

Now, given that it was a building society, with a branch next to the offices, with trained staff originating mortgages daily, don't you think it would have been a good idea to ask THEM what data they need to collect, and inspect what data are used in a mortgae first?

Anyway, stating with a screen, and no database to base it on, not having thought of what data need to be captured is dumb.
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>After all I've heard of some developers who start changing an application when they are documenting it. Imagine that !

Is this meant as a slur on what I'm doing at the moment? I'm actually writing the user manual, not documenting the system.