Under development

Posted on 25 Sep 2006 at 17:49

 

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David Robinson despairs of some of his clients' ideas. And to make matters worse, he's also started to question the motive behind some of these terrible schemes

I've done a couple of consultancy jobs recently that have brought me into contact with software developers from other organisations. Sharing experiences offers some interesting insights and confirms that I'm far from alone in suffering customers with ideas that could, shall we say, benefit from further work.

But one thing I didn't detect the others having to cope with is clients who want you to produce software that lies. We're not talking some kind of Enron fraud conspiracy, but some customers think they have a valid reason for having the programs hide, modify or otherwise be economical with the truth.

A typical case is one where the management want to store a false product cost in a stock-control system. The problem they're trying to solve goes like this:

The staff are paid by commission based on profit.

The sales order program shows the salespeople the sales value, the cost of the sales and the gross profit.

Sales staff can negotiate the price with the customer.

TELL ME LIES

Management think the salespeople give away too much profit to close the sale, despite the fact that to do so would hit the salesperson's pocket in lost commission. So they want the program to lie about the cost so that there appears to be less profit to 'give away'.

It wouldn't be so bad if all you had to do was store the false cost in the stock item record, but it doesn't stop there. First, there's the question of access to stock records. If the user is a salesperson, you have to ensure the program hides all traces of the real cost, whereas management and accounts users need to see both. Then there are the stock reports where you have to do the same kind of messing about. And the sales commission report and payroll calculations have to use the false costs, not the real ones. The implications of this simple lie ripple on throughout the program, making it a nightmare to maintain.

question time

Even better is the customer who wants to use our software to lie to himself. I was dubious about this project right from the start and did my best to persuade the client, Syd, to do the job with a standard package, but he wasn't having any of it. He wanted a customer survey program that asks questions such as "did the salesperson approach you in a friendly manner?" or "please rate our store appearance out of 10, with 10 being excellent".

Syd sends questionnaires full of such interrogatory stuff shortly after each customer makes a purchase and wants a program to integrate with his customer records file to store the results. Additionally, he needs to print the results in graphic form for discussion at his monthly management meeting. He had a program that somebody wrote but the author left, then the program broke and nobody knows how to fix it. Actually, discussions about the program specification suggest that bits of the program never worked in the first place, but Syd's not admitting that.

I did a quick Google search to see what's available off the shelf. There are hundreds of programs to choose from. As far as I can see, every conceivable angle has been covered by one program or another. The cost seems to vary from £200 up to almost any price you care to imagine, so I suggested that he look at the specs and save himself a lot of angst and expense. But he insisted on a custom solution.

We constructed a program for him that stores and analyses the questionnaire results. Syd's company has lots of different branches and he wants to reward those that best satisfy their customers. So each question is allocated a score, usually between 1 and 10, but not always. Some questions are self-scoring, such as the "rate our store appearance out of 10" type, while others are binary, as in "would you shop with us again? Yes/No".