Enter the Muppet Laboratories
2009-05-29 13:54, written by Robert KlemmeI have decided I will start an experiement. I haven’t done this before and I have no idea whether it will work as indended but I am sure we can pull this off together. Here’s the deal: I will try to let you participate in my thought process which hopefully will turn up some useful if not best practices. I don’t claim to be Don Knuth but hopefully you’ll find it interesting and worthwhile nevertheless. The tricky part will be to actually catch all the reasonings and record them in a format suitable for blogging.
In this article I will give a brief overview of how I intend to proceed. Of course a thing like this needs some form of project. We will come to that in a minute. The whole series of articles will roughly look like this:
- Initial presentation (this article)
- Description of the project goal
- Summary of collected requirements
- Several postings about actual code and decisions
- Presentation of the final result
After I present the goal you are invited to help distill requirements via the blog’s comment system. I will be the customer for the moment and I am sure with your active support we will get a list together with requirements that the project can meet.
The whole thing is loosely related to my job but I think you can extract at least parts of it for your own purposes. Of course we’ll be doing everything nicely modularized so reuse won’t be an issue. :-) I any case the main benefit for us all should be the thought process and insight into decision making during software development.
The project will be about analysis of large log files which contain high numbers of small business transactions. In parallel with coming up with a more detailed description I will try to come up with a generator which we can use to create files for testing purposes. This should help you get a better idea of what I am talking about.