The Systems Development Lifecycle - a fundamental, natural human process

Folks:

One thing you need to understand about the System Development Lifecycle (SDLC) is that each model is simply one author's way of describing (or “modeling”) a fundamental, natural process that we humans use instinctively to make anything from tonight's family dinner, to a global Business Information System (BIS), to landing a person on Mars.

While there are, admittedly, quite a few more tasks to be completed in landing a human on Mars than in getting tonight's dinner (unless I'm cooking...but that's another story!), both activities take an idea and bring it to fruition. The base process is the same every time. It's the same whether there is one person or one hundred thousand people involved in making the idea come true.

The thing that's always amazed me, though, is that although most of us use this process every day, it is such an ingrained part of us that most times most folks don't even realize they're using the SDLC...it's just the way things get done.
Join me as I use the SDLC to put together tonight's typical family dinner. We'll:

Start with a problem (“darned kids are hungry again! I just fed them last night!”),

Develop some options to solve the problem (“Let's see, what are my options. I guess I could let them go hungry, I could order pizza (again), or I could try to cook something for them here”),

Choose the best option for our situation (“I better make dinner here. I'll catch heck from my lovely better half if I feed the kids pizza three nights in a row!”);

Develop a specification (“Let's see, I better give them some veggies tonight...and no fish! There's no way I'm fighting to get little Janie to eat THAT again!”);

Design the product / system / dinner (“Cookbook....where the heck did that darned thing get to?!?”);

Build the product (“Ok. I've got the peas and carrots in the microwave. It says fifty minutes at 300 degrees for the chicken nuggets and fries...but the kids are hungry...I can speed this up....fifteen minutes at 500 degrees should work, right?”);

Test the product (“Ooooo...are those burned?”)

Fix the problems and retest (“If I scrape off the black spots and use a lot of ketchup, the kids will never know the difference!”)

Deliver the product to the customer (“Come on, Janie, eat! Daddy worked really hard on this dinner! You'll hurt Daddy's feelings if you don't eat!”)

Maintain, update and/or correct errors (“Hello, Bocce Club Pizzeria? Yeah, it's me again. Same order as last night. Yeah, delivery. Thanks. And if you promise not to tell my wife, there's an extra $20 in it for you. Yeah...again.!”)

Well, this is typical dinner at my house (at least when my wife works late!). But I think you get the idea. The SDLC isn't some complex process that was developed by and can only be implemented by some secret (and exorbitantly expensive) cabal of Information Technology (IT) Professionals and Business Consultants...although as an IT Professional and Business Consultant, I will admit many of my colleagues would love everyone to believe that.

Of course, the more complex the idea you are trying to bring to fruition, the more time and money it is going to take to make it happen. A typical Mom (or Dad) preparing dinner for her family might complete the entire project lifecycle - from need Identification (“darn, the kids are probably hungry!”) to Project Wrap-up (“Whew, the dishes are FINALLY done!”) - in an hour or two; while the team working to put a person on Mars will take decades and maybe trillions of dollars to get through theirs.

Understand that. regardless of which model you use to describe this process, each of the steps must be completed and, with a few exceptions that aren't relevant to this discussion, those steps must be completed order.

It's the way it works for virtually every human endeavor.

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I'd love to hear what you think. Feel free to leave a comment here or e-mail me at: TomFawls@Council4SmallBiz.com.

Wikipedia is Not Satanic!

I am currently an active (albeit part time) member of the faculty of two universities and one college. All three of these institutions of higher learning (and all universities and colleges, I assume) have a policies against students using Wikipedia as an approved research source for assignments or scholarly papers of any kind. As an employee of these institutions of higher learning, I understand the policies and fully comply with them, even though I do not agree with them. And here's why I don't. 

As a training, business management and IT (Information Technology) professional outside the university setting, however, I have found Wikipedia to be at least as well, and sometimes better, verified and supported than "mainstream" sources in the area(s) of these professions. 

While I absolutely agree that one needs to be careful to verify the information found in Wikipedia, the exact same thing is true about EVERY source, even such mainstream paragons of research virtue as this course's text book, the Encyclopedia Britannica and virtually ANY mainstream media outlet.  At least Wikipedia makes it clear when material in an article is NOT confirmed, verified or fully / properly supported. They flag those articles with a notice to that effect and ask for help from readers verifying and/or correcting the material.

To my knowledge, none of the mainstream outlets does this. 

If you look at the number of cases in recent years where such paragons of mainstream research virtue have published fiction as fact ("faction"); where other people's work is published  as their own; where unverified statements and works of "faction" from one media outlet is propagated around the world by other media outlets who don't bother to check even their most basic facts. Virtually every mainstream media outlet has had more than one of these type incidents in recent years, including The New York Times, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, NBC, and  FoxNews.

Do a Google search on "plagiarism scandals in _________" (fill in virtually any profession, publication or broadcast channel) and you may be surprised at exactly how poorly vetted these "trusted" sources really are.  

Visit http://gawker.com/5721413/plagiarism-scandal-reveals-espn-people-actually-write-down-that-stuff-they-say to see a few of the current scandals.

Read the article on "Plagiarism in medical / scientific literature" found at http://journals.lww.com/cardiovascularpharm/Fulltext/2010/12000/Plagiarism_in_the_Medical_Scientific_Literature.17.aspx.

Additionally, the fact that virtually anyone can offer articles for publication (not every article submitted is automatically published) means that it is easier for new ideas to be published and offered for professional peer review than in the "established" professional journals where financial gain and internal politics often play a larger part in what gets published than "truth" and "fact". In most articles on professional topics, the fact that there are so many practitioners reading the article and the fact that practitioners in the field have an opportunity to comment on and challenge the article, actually works to make Wikipedia a better-vetted source than any other I'm aware of.

Having said all this, of course, and in compliance with University / College policy, I, of course inform all my students in all my courses that Wikipedia is not an acceptable source to use for their assignments...but I can't stop them from using it in the real world.

There. I met my "toe-the-party-line" professional obligations.

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This BLOG is based on an answer I wrote to a student's question on 01/08/2011. I'd love to hear what you think. Feel free to leave a comment here or e-mail me at: TomFawls@Council4SmallBiz.com.

Cats and dogs and kids and peace and quiet

I originally posted the following on the emigrant.ie's discussion boards in response to a question about cats, dogs and the grander meaning of life. I just found it and thought some of you might enjoy reading it. The original posting can be found at the link associated with this posting.

We currently have (along with assorted kids, fish and "wild" animals roaming the property) 4 cats and a dog. Three of the cats are older (10 to 14 years old) who have not gotten along with each other in all the years we've had them (since kittenhood for all of them). The 4th cat is the latest stray...about 3 - 4 months old and quickly learning not to bother the other cats.

The dog was a "drop-off" we took in as a puppy back in March. She's part of the family and has come to an uneasy truce with at least one of the cats. She is constantly trying to "play" with the kitten, but her size, noise and exuberance seem to scare the kitten (who's a bit skittish, as strays often are) away.

Since my wife and I are also all too often "all-too-pragmatic" people, we set certain rules that limit interaction between the species within our family's pet population - carefully watching the interactions to ensure no one ends up dead, mangled or too emotionally scarred for life.

On the other hand, since we have heard stories of cats and dogs living together in harmony and, since we are also eternal optimists in this area, from time to time we attempt to "forcibly integrate" the family pets - putting them into (heavily controlled) situations where they are forced to interact with each other. It is rarely successful from an integration standpoint, but it is (almost) always entertaining.

If you've read this far, you're probably beginning to wonder what all this has to do with answering Wildside's initial question.

The simple truth is - I don't know.

I was actually hoping that the act of documenting these experiences would bring some earth-shattering, universal truth to light for me...and that by relating these truths in this message, I would become the "hero of the thread" (a position which actually exists when I'm "in my happy place").

Unfortunately, all this has done for me is to highlight the fact that I have no answer to any of this and that the only thing I know to do is to keep slogging through each day - trying to contain the violence in each situation and celebrating the small victories (like the fact that at least one of our cats can now sit in the same room as the dog without constantly trying to scratch her nose).

Ouch, my head hurts now!

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I'd love to hear what you think. Feel free to leave a comment here or e-mail me at: TomFawls@Council4SmallBiz.com.