The seed of an idea (which I doubt is new, but don't have time to research just yet)....
Anybody else find themselves playing telephone on a regular basis? The problem starts out as "the user submits an order, and we save it in the database", which everybody agrees is fairly straightforward, and much later you discover that the database is assuming one character set, where the UI is assuming another. The transfer happens via XML, which needs to be encoded then data passed to a procedure, which requires a different set of escapes. Meanwhile, QA is trying to implement a testharness, based on submissions of URL-encoded key/value pairs....
I want to be able to represent this, in a way that exposes as early as possible any incompatible assumptions.
Maybe puzzle pieces, so that you can only put them together if the pins and holes line up (what are those things called, anyway?).
Or perhaps a type library, which can be combined with a compiler of some strongly typed language, so that it screams when you try to pass ASCII 8 to a routine expecting ISO-8859-1.
June 13, 2003 11:22 AM
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