* Posts by Stephen Phillips

2 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2007

Microsoft waves in Minority Report-style computing era

Stephen Phillips

Give credit where it's due

Come on people! If Steve Jobs had announced this product the Mac Legions would be declaring it the Second Coming. But since it comes from "Micro$haft" people can only throw stones at it.

How is it that Apple can do no wrong, Microsoft can only do wrong, and the bugginess of other companies software (am I the only one who's noticed how flaky Adobe software is?) goes entirely unremarked?

Vague and ambiguous use cases

Stephen Phillips

A great example of how not to write a use case!

Arguably the references to the UI elements are objectionable, however the worst practice is reference to the database activity. The analyst is deciding when to assign an ID, and when to save the claim. This places a lot of assumptions around an operation which can be extremely complex. Are we doing a long running transaction? Do we have multiple data sources that need coordinating? Is there a database at all, or are we talking to an SOA-centric data source, with its own interaction patterns? No matter... the analyst blithely tells us how it's going to work. How nice of him/her!

Your approach is obviously UML-centric; it's my opinion that a common drawback of UML usage is that it forces us to preemptively declare entities before we really know what we're talking about. Your example illustrates this problem nicely.