They were fired

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Introduction

A thread on the scalability of software leads to some storytelling.

The Story

I have a story for you.

I have a client, an insurance company based in Joburg. They need to send

figures to their principal every month, so far so good. Their principal

insurance company is way behind, technology wise, and is going through

the "we need a proper system" phase that I sent my client through in 2003.

So, a company was brought in by the principal.

They specified a feed, consisting of lines with fixed length fields,

with about 700 columns per row. Epic epic failure. They were fired.

So, a second company was brought in by the principal.

They specified a feed, this time it had an XSD! Fed the XSD through a

code generator, we had an accurate feed. The client paid for it out of

goodwill. For reasons unclear, this company didn't deliver although they

started well. They were fired.

So, a third company was brought in by the principal.

This third company threw out absolutely everything, and specified a feed

with pipe delimited fields. In ASCII. WTF???? It's two thousand and

fsking nine forfsckssakes.

I put my foot down.

I sent a list of demands to the directors of the client, who passed it

across to the directors of the principal, who passed it onto the third

company, who made it clear in their response that they didn't know what

they were doing, they're guaranteed to be fired, and they are wasting my

client's time and money.

I met in London recently with a representative of the principal to break

the impasse, and set out my concerns. I fely sorry for the guy, he was a

business person who had been lumped with the "computer problem", and was

stuck between warring factions. The compromise was that on condition

that they fixed outstanding issues in their spec, we would do the feed

for the third time.

News gets round to the third company, who have sent excuses, but no

amended spec.

And until I get the amended spec, no work will get done.

The third company has made claims that they follow a software

development life cycle, but they can't fix bugs in their spec. And

because I am not going to leave the holes in their spec to cause errors

in the feed, and in turn audits from the principal, I'm not budging

until they fix it.

Regards,

Graham