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identifying problems might be much more spontaneous, almost whimsical. To properly assess a problem, you have to ask yourself how important the problem is and why you must assess it. Corporate developers must have a reasonable understanding of workgroup-specific business processes and sometimes corporatewide workflow patterns. This knowledge helps provide boundaries around the problem so that any further development activity stays within a well-defined scope. |
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New Term: Problem assessment is the act of identifying the nature of a problem in a given context. |
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For any kind of software development project you undertake, you will undergo a phase known as Inception. The Inception Phase of a project establishes the justification for proceeding further with the development of a solution. You define the scope of the project in the Inception Phase after assessing the problem. |
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This phase is very important. In it, you honestly assess whether the problem can be adequately solved. For simple, individual projects, the decision might come down to whether you personally have the time and motivation to develop a solution. For larger enterprise applications, however, the decision is much more critical and usually involves hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. In the latter case, true honesty can save money if the solution seems cost prohibitive. By true honesty, I mean that determining whether a problem is worth solving requires adequately analyzing the problem and identifying key abstractions (or initial business concepts) before making a decision about proceeding with a project. Deciding to proceed with the design of a solution because it feels right doesn't justify spending millions of dollars on solution development. |
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For corporate and commercial projects, the Inception Phase is crucial. In fact, given that such projects are prone to budgetary constraints, the best way to gauge success factors is to iterate through problem assessment and partial analysis for a solution. On many corporate projects, project managers make ad hoc guesses about how long it takes to develop an application. Usually, there is little reasoning behind these guesses, yet companies pour millions of dollars into such projects. This is akin to the old days when wildcatters sunk huge amounts of money into locating oil on the basis of speculationand usually went bankrupt from these gambles. For corporate projects, schedule gambling is written off, and unwitting programmers are usually blamed for schedule slips. This is particularly true for Visual Basic developers, who must live up to managerial expectation of Visual Basic's ease of use. |
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Undergoing problem assessment and analysis as a precondition for Inception helps managers make a more realistic estimate about the project's completion. Yes, this is more |
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