I'm guessing architects get such requests all the time. They're perhaps a little luckier in that they can whip up a quick sketch to show some ideas, and hopefully they can produce an agreed design that forms the basis of their contract. And all this before a brick is laid. In my experience, we don't have that luxury with software development. We need to build some software first before we can test it out on some real data. And if you work in education like me, you can be pretty sure that the first real data you run it against looks nothing like the sample data you were provided with three months earlier.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
