>>Unfortunately, Michel, while your sanity will remain intact with this option, your reputation may not. It is as important to be a good analyst as it is a good programmer; the client expects *you* to provide an automated model of his business. Very few clients map out all of the business rules and exceptions for you, as I'm sure you are aware. By creating an entity model, as a minimum, and a process model and then getting it signed off by the client, you are ensuring that no matter what happens, you have done your professional best.
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>Are you saying that I'm not professional? Just Kidding. I gave this answer somewhat tongue in cheek. Somewhat....
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>This type of thing does happen here, but being here for the long run, what I've been able to do is exactly what you suggest. Most of the time. There are those managers that refuse to listen and wondering how they ever got their position does not help. In those cases I think my list is very accurate.
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>Jeff

Not trying to slam John, but I get the feeling that he has never been in this position. I'm currently doing some outside work for someone. The project was SUPPOSED to have been 95% finished (yeah, right....shoulda known) and so far the functionality of 3 screens have been completely changed, one of them 7 times, 3 new modules have been added, he will not do ANY testing if I'm not there but he's put it out into 3 different offices for beta testing. And his attitude is "the clock's running...what's your problem?" when I try to explain to him that you don't change major functionality when it's in beta. There are no written specs, and happy boy keeps falling back to the way it was ORGINALLY. It's VERY frustrating. The only reason I haven't quit the project is the fact that I've NEVER quit a project, I've always finished them.

Personally, I would add a fourth choice to your list: FOLD/SPINDLE/MUTILATE THE CLIENT.

Now he wants me to upgrade it to VFP. And boy will I have him there! He's already been informed that there WILL be analysis and design done. There WILL be specs written and agreed on before I set line of code 1 down.