On Monday, 12 November 2018 19:37:17 GMT Keith Edmunds wrote:
> Start by writing your requirements. The hard part: do NOT include any
> implementation details in the requirements. Focus on what, not how.
Before I say anything else, I feel that I should point out that before I
retired, a large part of my job was writing Requirement Specifications for
very large Aerospace companies.
I am well aware of the need for Requirements to state the what and not the
how.
> For example, "The database should be hosted on a website somewhere" is not
> a requirement. It is a way of achieving an unstated requirement; there may
> be other, even better, ways.
Not really. All Requirements have to start from somewhere. For example, a
stakeholder (for that read 'Customer') has some internal requirements and will
already have made some design choices. So instead of starting at rock bottom
and saying that this piece of software has to do x, y and z. he might say that
this piece of software has to run on an off-the-shelf PC and be hosted by
Linux. (Sadly it was often Windows and the product must use Sharepoint.
(Urgh) ) That 'how' for the stakeholder now becomes 'what' for the supplier.
In my case, the WMT is the stakeholder and members of the WMT team had already
decided that the solution should be accessible from multiple devices. This
drove the need for my reference to a website (which I have since clarified to
mean not necessarily a web page).
Yes. I could have written a full blown Requirement Specification for this, in
which case the top-level requirement would have been accessible from various
devices. However, left like that; the current solution would have fulfilled
that requirement because it is possible to open a LibreOffice spreadsheet on
Windows, Linux or MacOS (and Android I believe). However, that wouldn't have
allowed the access capabilities that we wanted.
So in this case, the requirement is 'hosted on a website somewhere' because we
have access to a website that we can develop and we had already decided that
was what we wanted.
> Once you've written the requirements, you can look at how you could
> implement them. From what you've said so far, I'd be looking at a Flask
> app (or, if you'd prefer to spend nine months learning the platform,
> Django).
As mentioned earlier, my hosting provider includes MySQL as part of my
package, and Stephen Wolff has suggested off list that the hosting provider
might also provide access to PHPMyAdmin. It does; so I am looking into how
suitable that is for our purpose.
On that subject, can anyone comment on that? I can see that PHPMyAdmin allows
the database to be developed, (and the records can be imported from
LibreOffice Calc) but I'm not sure how the users would then access it. As I
said at the beginning, I have very little knowledge of database development
(yet).
> But start with the requirements.
Well I thought I had; albeit a bit informal.
--
Terry Coles
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