Re: Do you have a Knowledge Officer?


Robert <no@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:190bg3l4erp8cpqoe80tgjsbhagb2mg674@xxxxxxxxxx

There should be at least five documents or, ideally, an outliner that
allows hiding and
revealing lower levels. The levels are: business plan, business
requirement, high level
design, detailed design and source code. There should also be links to
execution logs,
incident reports and usage statistics.

The document you have in mind is detailed design, which is fine for
techies but useless to
management.



So far as the detailed design document is concerned -

I've long been of the opinion that it ought to be possible to design a
universal specifications language - universal in terms of application
programming, anyway - that is completely language and platform agnostic,
that contains basic, common "instructions" and allows for custom code
modules, that will generate code in any source language desired. I know
there have been many approaches to this, from the FARGO report generator on
the IBM 1401 to the most sophisticated tools available today - but I don't
think there is any product that will allow complete code independence and
mandate changes to be implemented by changing the specs, at the same time
being adequate for all applications (a very imprecise requirement, I admit,
but I have to say something!)

I'd be interested in hearing of counter-examples! One man's experience is
never adequate.

I did some development on my own time on such a system and it seemed to
indicate that a very small set of intrinsic functions or operators ("atomic"
in that they couldn't be expressed by combining other functions) - perhaps
30 or so - along with a few higher-level "verbs" such as as table lookup
(again a rather small number) combined with custom code segments that would
be accessed by a "custom verb" - would suffice for any application situation
that I could think of. I make no apology for the "custom code" idea,
because every language has "call-out" facilities, and if you don't have that
you must define verbs peculiar to the language to allow for them - a futile
effort. Given such a tool, a system defined in the spec language could be
generated in any desired target language to experiment with speed or
footprint issues - source code maintenance would no longer be a problem
since it wouldn't be done - or, by changing the underlying generating
dataset, even different techniques in the same langauge could be compared.

Unfortunately I never had the time or resources to get very far with it.

PL





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