Back To Basics: Deep Dive Part 5

Software Analysis: What are you building on – Part 1

The main role of the analyst is to design the changed business process and the system that goes with it in order to solve a business problem or achieve a goal.

So, how can you even start doing this if you do not fundamentally understand your customer’s existing systems and tech landscape?

"If you don’t know where you are, a map won’t help." – Watts Humphrey

A. Case Study

Let’s consider the following two cases from previous projects I worked on and learn from them.

Tshiamiso Trust

The Tshiamiso Trust aims to pay out claims to South African mineworkers affected by Silicosis and Tuberculosis lung diseases and who worked between 1965 and 2019 in certain Gold mines.

We had the privilege of creating the end-to-end system for this Trust (led by Harmony Gold and later Rand Mutual Assurance). In the early days of the project, various stakeholders quickly suggested (meaning, almost demanded) a solution centred around a smartphone app.

However, what these stakeholders did not know is that 8 out of 10 mineworkers do not have a smartphone.

Arguments could not convince anyone, but all of these stakeholders stopped demanding the moment they met the mineworkers and understood the technology landscape we had to deal with.

Spoornet

When we started this project, Windows based graphical user interfaces (GUI) were new. As developers, we decided to base the entire user interface design on a very dynamic GUI.

It looked amazing. The customers loved it as well. However, once deployed – it was painfully slow, meaning very sluggish.

So slow that it greatly frustrated the users, as they waited and waited and waited.

A bit off the point, but I’ve learned a significant lesson here:

Functionality and speed first, then beauty. Users will hate your system if it is slow or not working well, irrespective of how it looks.

It took us many long nights and days to determine and realise that the network on the site was too slow for the amount of traffic between the GUI and the server.

Bottom line, we never considered these things in designing the solution. How we solved the problem is a story for another day.

You can download the whitepaper from https://jalia.co.za/services/

Author: Henk Maritz (jalia.co.za)

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