Loading ...An excerpt from my new article:
How many times have you heard this:
Marketing guy: I know it’s only four days before launch, but we need to make sure that people with green eyes aren’t allowed to buy our fantastic new product, the Squash Organizer.
Developer dude: That’s going to create a problem. The way the database tables are set-up we actually perform two outer joins to find out if the person has green eyes; once to get their genetic pre-disposition and a second time to get their actual eye color. But this join can’t be done until we’re at step 4, and since we’re storing values in the session and the dna object is not instantiated yet…
Marketing guy (interrupting so he doesn’t have to hear a 10 minute explanation complete with poorly-drawn white board sketches): How long do think this change will take?
Developer dude: Well, aside from the issue I mentioned, this raises questions like: is it both eyes or only one? Can people with green eyes still buy a Zucchini Organizer? What if they choose a Zucchini Organizer and then later change to a Squash Organizer, do we have to repeat the validation?
Marketing guy (defeated, with hands in the air): Can’t we just add a boolean field to the database called “HasGreenEyes”?
Programmers don’t speak the same language as the rest of the world for one simple reason: you can’t see a project from two altitudes at once.
Read the entire article here.