Nisley says "Imagine a programming contractor proposing that increasing the average interrupt latency by 10 μs would reduce the module size by 5 percent and improve the error rate by 3 percent. When was the last time you saw precise numeric relations between various aspects of a programming project, before …

I recently reviewed some end user-authored use cases, and they -- of course -- reflect the way people actually work. The computer system was largely incidental to what they did.

Each use case listed half a dozen actors, had a dozen or more steps, and involved many off-line interactions among the actors …

The following weirdness often happens when we encounter complex business problems.

1. The users hate something and want new software. They justify a project to spend $100K replacing something that appears broken.
2. The Business Analyst notes a control issue that is really a conflict between software functionality and business rewards.
3. The …

In Rat-holes of Lost Time [Rat-Holes of Lost Time ], I thought out loud about software development and how the resulting software product may or may not be of any value. In SEI terminology [view_qm ], this is Need Satisfaction. Sometimes I call it Solving The Problem ™.

I tried to distinguish two …

Much of software development is best described as "problem-solving". Much of the rest, BTW, is knowledge capture.

When we look at the time spent on problem solving we can see four potential outcomes.

1. Time is spent producing a viable solution to the actual problem.
2. Time is spent producing a non-solution …

In it, Bruce Silver recollects process reengineering gurus who warned "Don't pave the cowpaths!". Presumably because the cow path was a random walk all over the pasture land, and wasn't the most efficient course.

However, anyone who was watched cows at work will tell you that the cow path is …

In principle, stating a problem is a trivial exercise: someone can't do something. It can be made wonderfully complex, however. The root cause of the complexity could be a fundamental unwillingness to state the problem without including technology hints like "database" or "hierarchy" or "project management" or "change control".

The "correct" answer is to fully normalize the design and get away from a mixed bag of columns and nulls. The MESS is bad from every perspective, except query performance. A semi-normalized design that separates the STATE CHANGES from the ESSENTIAL DEFINITION is an optimal design in many respects.

Here …

Experimental results depend on details of the database server and the data model used. Actual application software may have other confounding problems that make these results less dramatic or more dramatic when applied to a existing application design.

I compared three table designs described in a previous posting Normalization Experiment …

Fragmentation & similar is sometimes a storage problem in I/O generated, vs. the gross space consumed. This distinction didn't leap out at me.

Performance degradation and storage expansion are closely related, but only for certain kinds of queries. Full table scans are penalized by sparsely used storage. Individual row retrievals …