Monday, December 14, 2009

Memories of IT - 2001 - Arguments over interfaces...solved.

So, I deliver Use Cases and design/development begins. My group designs a service and interface following the Architecture. The KL systems people want a specific date/time-stamp form an existing system in the interface; our lead designer says no, that any other system using the interface should not know where the data provided came from, so that the service can be changed in the future without disrupting any systems using the service…. Things got quite heated. In a moment of prescience, upon hearing of this argument, I stepped in and said that this was a requirement issue, not a design issue. The date/time-stamp was actually the time a Shipment was first recorded in a DHL System. I added that date to our data model, then added it to the Use Cases, and the argument ended, at least publicly… there always seem to be some level of discord between DHL Systems ATP and Systems areas in DHL. We actually printed a poster of a white tower and put it on the wall heading into our office.

So, design and development went ahead for the pilot, was accepted, and then went live. For some period of time, at least, when you searched for your Shipment on DHL.com, you used a service based on my Use Cases.

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About Me

Ontario, Canada
I have been an IT Business Analyst for 25 years, so I must have learned something. Also been on a lot of projects, which I have distilled into the book "Cascade": follow the link to the right to see more.