Often, we hear software developers (myself included) say, “yeah … we can definitely do that!” or “yeah … you have come to the right place, anything you want .. we can build it for you”! Then often, we too hear stories of software projects fail here and there. And now I begin to wonder how things could be worked out properly so problems, or worst case, failures can be avoided.
What happened to me recently could probably be one of the reasons why software projects fail. For the past several months, I have been working on a system that concerns the health of people. The system is intended for use by doctors, dentists, physical therapists, nurses, or any practice or profession that deals with people’s health, etc. The system, when done, will handle quite an extensive amount of data gathered from a good number of processes and sources that are realized every minute of the day.
For the past several months, there was a good amount of communication between my group and those potential users of the system. A lot of time were spent in requirements discovery and gathering, analysis, and everybody even subject a lot of items to questions just to sort things out clearly so things come out fine. A near functional prototype has been established for several months and it looks like everybody is happy of everyone’s progress … including the state of the system. Beta testing was conducted, had 6 major beta builds in the last few months, and seemed not a thing was amiss. In fact, it is almost done that the potential users are so eager to have the system deployed already and pioneered as soon as possible (that would have been like last month). I was into the finishing touches and was like in the process of putting icing on the cake.
Then … it was KABLAAAAAAMMMMMM!!! As the project’s database designer, I thought of something that hurled everything back into the drawing board. I miss identifying one piece of information that should have been in the database design from the very start. With the set of people contributing to make this happen … this one thing never had any manifestation of being thought out. The medical guys involved in the project never thought of the item. The software development guys never had any clue. I never had any clue. And I have contemplated so deeply to analyze how I could miss something this important. People who played the analyst role came short in thinking about this (I am one of those). But I, being the database designer, am blaming of missing something so important.
After gathering myself, I came to a conclusion that the only time that I’d be able to easily identify or come across such piece of information, is probably when I am a doctor, a practicing one, and at the same time a database designer who had lots of databases and experience tucked under my belt. I caught the missing piece from a totally unrelated event, not even related to what I am doing.
To cut the story short, what happened thereafter was 1 table was added to the database structure with 1 new column that would serve as a reference for 70% of other tables. With the change, 70% of sql code were re-written, 50% of critical UI got revamped and lots of time lost and gained lots of sleepless nights.
The moral of my story, though completely lacking of juicy technical details as I cannot divulge those for fear of legal ramifications and of ridicule (ano ako hilo? hahahha), software development / technical expertise can only bring us to certain extents and domain expertise is clearly a desirable attribute one can have, especially if you are a database designer. The reality and funny thing though is that, I can’t picture myself as a doctor and a database person so I can eliminate this problem in the future and this is probably the reason why there are just too many software project that have failed. And I can still hear myself saying “yeah … of course, anything you want, I can build it for you!”.
The system I talked about here is almost done and is looking really good! And I don’t think I have missed some more that would screw up my day. How about you? Do you say, being considered as an expert, can do of anything that is asked of you? 😛
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