On the Stre@m

So we have seen that a big project relies on a lot of documents. One of this documents is the GUI mockup.

Graphical mockups are designs, for web pages or other products. Mockups typically use some or all of the actual graphics that will appear on the GUI. They are produced in a digital format (image, excel, visio, html) based on some specifications written by the analysts.

When a developer makes a JSP page for example, he or she must draw the interface according to this graphical mockup. But the analysts also make another document that must be followed by the developer: the interface requirements specifications. This document specify what components must appear inside the GUI (eg. the fields from the database that must appear and their labels). Strange enough, it does not specify the behavior, just the labels. Strange, as I think that the mockup should specify the content of an interface and how it is drown, because when you draw the interface, you can see how the labels will show into the page and you can establish their length for example. So the interface requirements specification should be the base for the mockup in indicating WHAT must appear onto the interface and HOW the components should behave, but not WHAT the labels are in the exact form.

Anyway, most of the time this two documents have different informations so the developer does not know what to follow. And the bugs start showing into the bugs reporting system.

The chaos theory as it is understood by the physicists is really about finding the underlying order in apparently random data.

But what is the relation with a software project?

Let’s suppose we have a company that is quite large and a software project is done using a certain standard. This standard requires a lot of documents to be written by various people. For example there are documents that describe the interface, documents that describe the database and documents that describe the use case. Everything is nice and proper organized.

Or is it? What dwells under the surface?

Sometimes working in this conditions is putting together the underlying random data beneath the apparently order.

We will dive head first into this in the following articles.