Re: Is there a word for this

"Michael C" <mike@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:e8odGTFPIHA.5140@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I have posted this on news.securecomp.org also, but am interested in
people
here's opinions.

Just say a company needs to write a program to keep track of calls to
customers. They get someone to write them an app and call it "Call Log
App".
Then someone wants to keep track of staff holidays so someone writes them
a
different app called "Staff Holiday App". Then someone wants to keep track
of which staff made the calls to the customer so they do some hack to
either
duplicate staff in both apps or link them up. Then someone wants to
automatically send email to the staff/customers but they don't store
emails
against the name. Because they want to do this in both apps they duplicate
all the work but make it a little different in each. Over the years this
continues to build into more and more of a mess.

The alternative would be to say right at the start that we need a company
wide application to do stuff. This application will be called "Company X
App". It will store all the basic data that relates to the company, eg
staff, customers, products etc and standard information associated with
them, eg phone numbers, emails, addresses. Even if this information is not
currently used by the app it is a good place to store it.

Anyway, my question is simply, is there a word for this style of thinking?

The aforementioned style of thinking? Asinine. Short-sighted. <g>

Of course we can't foresee what will be needed in the future... that crystal
ball has yet to be invented. But it's generally wise to keep in mind that
there may be future "modulimizations" (just invented that word), and thus
try to engineer things in such a way that allows future implementations. In
the above example, it seems to have started as a little thing (Call Log)
that over time snowballed (Mega-Nightmare App). It seems that between "Call
Log" and "Staff Holiday" is when someone should have said "Whoa, perhaps we
need to re-engineer some aspects. Not necessarily a mega app, but a system
of apps that can integrate and thus grow as needed... perhaps using some
sort of masterfile architecture. And we better document the heck out of
this!"


.

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