Software, Software Development and other Atrocities

I started my PhD thinking on Decision Support Systems (DSS). I’d been working on one in my previous job. Having found so many difficulties while gathering information (interviewing people and reading documentation), and designing the system, I thought that it was a good idea to investigate better development practices to do this. My initial work was on describing the kind of settings I had found during my years as a developer. To do this I first identified the problematic factors that made analysis and design so complex. This is what I found:

• There was a great variety of activities. Those varied from academic related issues, like module planning and student complaints to administrative issues such as budget preparation and marketing promotions. There were a number of people who combined their academic and administrative functions in an unclear fashion.

• Users performed similar processes in different ways among the university areas. The personal styles that dominated shaped the development of the processes.

• Processes changed through time specially when the authorities of the university were replaced.

• A decision making process may be initiated by any member of the administrative or academic staff in the university or by students.

• The nature of the problem and the working styles influenced the way people would carry out the decision making.

• Most of the processes involved flow of a huge variety of documentation like reports with information extracted from the databases (tables, charts) but also of documents containing unstructured information such as texts with decision makers’ opinions and decisions.

• Users worked alone, in groups or in multiple groups depending on the convenience and availability of the interested.

• The university board and other committees meetings were, in some cases, the last stage in the process. However, most of the hard work was performed before they met.

• There was a requirement of recording all the data resulting from the decision making processes that were carried out at the highest levels of the university, as it was specified in the university regulations. However, this need was also perceived in most of the medium level staff as they believed that this information may facilitate their work in the future.

• Information was required in most of the stages of a process.

well well well I got bored..... zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

To be continued…