Sobek
09-26-2007, 09:56 PM
Short form: Stupid bitch can't write documentation to save her ass. And gets huffy when called on it. And plays blatant politics at work.
So, I started on a new project at the beginning of the month. It had been in the requirements phase since May or so. The project is basically running a few (fucking huge) forms through a workflow. Add definition of user X can edit section Y at stage Z, and you've got the high level.
The 80+ page requirement document got signed off on last week. Over half of the document is a copy/paste of the Word forms the users already had. Not too bad, if the forms were just a list of question/answer pairs, but it ain't.
One form, in particular, is ~130 fields in a semi-random layout not counting the unbounded child tables. There is no definition of which table cells are whitespace and which require data. Those child tables? I only know they're unbounded (or child tables at all) because I sat in on a couple of the later requirements meetings -- that isn't defined in the requirements document.
Some fields are short text, some are memo, some are drop-downs. Definition of which is which is hit-and-miss. Those that are defined as drop-downs are only because the BA took the time to right-click on the Word field, pull up the properties of the field, and screen capture the (occasionally 25 screens worth of) options and paste them into the form, totally fucking up what layout the customer did have.
Drop downs come in three flavors -- static listings, user maintained listings, and listings imported from other systems. Guess how much definition I have of which is which? If you said "not a single reference anywhere in the document" you would be correct.
What definition I have on anything is all garbled together. The same sort of information is found under totally different sections. Much of it isn't even in complete sentences.
Any suggestions made are unwelcome. Shit, I got the evil eye and a snarky remark because I wanted conditional field validation and display requirements grouped together and specifically called out rather than left to the truncated text on the customer's Word forms.
The requirements phase of the project is three months behind schedule. If you discount the table of contents, boiler-plate verbage, title page, tables of signatory names, etc. almost 2/3 of the document is copy/paste of shit the user sent to us -- shit they have already decided doesn't work well enough.
My paperwork is doubled because I have to translate this Engrish crap into something meaningful for my design document to even have a baseline against which to develop.
This isn't the first time I've had a shit document from this BA, either. Last time, she blamed it on an insane end-user and I bought it. This time, she tried the same thing, but I've met the end users and was able to get coherant requirements from them in the meetings I attended. I'm not the only developer that has problems with her, either.
And, the whole while I've been on this project (or previous projects) with her, she's been mocking the importance of documentation and denigrating the idea of a software lifecycle. I'm sorry, but isn't that pretty much the definition of what gives her a job? Plus, she spends her time badgering me about how I should make sure I represent her well to our boss, should let him know how ridiculously hard the project is and how difficult the users are to work with. She wants to make sure I'm checking the right boxes on the project evaluation (with the implied threat that I'd better give her good marks or she'll get me).
Mother fucker, I'm peeved. But it did feel good to bitch.
After I get my documentation done, I'm going to go chat with our shared boss.
So, I started on a new project at the beginning of the month. It had been in the requirements phase since May or so. The project is basically running a few (fucking huge) forms through a workflow. Add definition of user X can edit section Y at stage Z, and you've got the high level.
The 80+ page requirement document got signed off on last week. Over half of the document is a copy/paste of the Word forms the users already had. Not too bad, if the forms were just a list of question/answer pairs, but it ain't.
One form, in particular, is ~130 fields in a semi-random layout not counting the unbounded child tables. There is no definition of which table cells are whitespace and which require data. Those child tables? I only know they're unbounded (or child tables at all) because I sat in on a couple of the later requirements meetings -- that isn't defined in the requirements document.
Some fields are short text, some are memo, some are drop-downs. Definition of which is which is hit-and-miss. Those that are defined as drop-downs are only because the BA took the time to right-click on the Word field, pull up the properties of the field, and screen capture the (occasionally 25 screens worth of) options and paste them into the form, totally fucking up what layout the customer did have.
Drop downs come in three flavors -- static listings, user maintained listings, and listings imported from other systems. Guess how much definition I have of which is which? If you said "not a single reference anywhere in the document" you would be correct.
What definition I have on anything is all garbled together. The same sort of information is found under totally different sections. Much of it isn't even in complete sentences.
Any suggestions made are unwelcome. Shit, I got the evil eye and a snarky remark because I wanted conditional field validation and display requirements grouped together and specifically called out rather than left to the truncated text on the customer's Word forms.
The requirements phase of the project is three months behind schedule. If you discount the table of contents, boiler-plate verbage, title page, tables of signatory names, etc. almost 2/3 of the document is copy/paste of shit the user sent to us -- shit they have already decided doesn't work well enough.
My paperwork is doubled because I have to translate this Engrish crap into something meaningful for my design document to even have a baseline against which to develop.
This isn't the first time I've had a shit document from this BA, either. Last time, she blamed it on an insane end-user and I bought it. This time, she tried the same thing, but I've met the end users and was able to get coherant requirements from them in the meetings I attended. I'm not the only developer that has problems with her, either.
And, the whole while I've been on this project (or previous projects) with her, she's been mocking the importance of documentation and denigrating the idea of a software lifecycle. I'm sorry, but isn't that pretty much the definition of what gives her a job? Plus, she spends her time badgering me about how I should make sure I represent her well to our boss, should let him know how ridiculously hard the project is and how difficult the users are to work with. She wants to make sure I'm checking the right boxes on the project evaluation (with the implied threat that I'd better give her good marks or she'll get me).
Mother fucker, I'm peeved. But it did feel good to bitch.
After I get my documentation done, I'm going to go chat with our shared boss.