Newsletter102

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Number 102

Welcome to the latest issue of Precision Matters - the Precision Design Technology (PDT) Newsletter.

In these times of economic stress and the constant call to do more with less, I thought it would be helpful to outline some of the technical causes for extra cost and time being spent during the implementation of business IT information systems.

PDT has always promoted and supported the need for specifications in IT. This is not a popular position to take up these days with the rush to implement using agile, RAD and other iterative methods. We believe the specification forms an important step in the iterative development process; apart from making more concrete thoughts that may be imperfectly formed in people's heads, it provides the means through which systems can be built faster.

If you have any comments you wish to make about this Newsletter, please feel free to contact us through our website here or by email here or to: newsletter@precisiondesign.co.uk.

Now read on...

Need an IT Project But Have No Time or Money?

With pressure on businesses today to run faster and be slimmer, managers must consider any opportunity. If you need an IT solution for your business, but don’t have the time or the budget, what are the options?

You could do without and suffer the consequences of lower efficiency, higher product or service cost and ultimately lower turnover and profitability as customers go elsewhere.
You could embark on a phased introduction, knowing that today you cannot afford the cost of the whole system but meeting the deadline at least with a part. This would meet the deadline. Meanwhile the opposition who have the whole system in place, will attract some of your market share and again affect your bottom line.

Or you could consider a solution that is capable of reducing delivery time-scales and could deliver a better solution at a lower cost. If this is attractive, consider these pointers:

IT projects are fraught with misunderstandings, misinterpretations and missed deadlines. Time and cost over-runs are commonly attributed in part to bad specification, leading to incorrect implementation and the consequent need for rework. Specifications take time to create and are often discarded soon after when they are transformed into designs. Transformations are not perfect and errors are not discovered until acceptance testing reveals a mismatch between what the user really needed and what the system delivers.

Projects also suffer from bugs. Bugs are errors introduced by programmers that compilers and previous testing fail to discover. Bugs and bug fixing are part of a programmer’s life. Bugs cost time and money. For a user, a bug is at the least an annoyance and at the worst may make the system unfit for purpose. Users never know how and when the next bug will manifest itself; a bug in reporting for instance may never be found, but may be generating incorrect figures for the life of the system.

Speed of delivery of a project is partly dependent upon the speed at which individual programmers can create code to implement system functionality. Language compilers routinely use code generation by rule, which is fast and accurate. What can save your project time is for the implementation to use rule based code generation from the specification directly to code.

An approach that offers to remove human introduced bugs and could deliver considerably more quickly at significantly reduced cost may be the solution you are searching for.

This is what the SPECIFY4IT approach from Precision Design Technology can do for you.

If you’re short of time and money for your IT project, contact us on 0844-887 1328 or via the contact page here.

Want to reproduce this article?

Yes you can, so long as you accredit it to Robin Oldman, Precision Design Technology Ltd. and attach the following biography to the article at the bottom:

Precision Design Technology, (PDT), the IT systems experts, provides world-class consultancy and solutions for IT information systems to help its customers develop affordable, high integrity software for business. Normally high-integrity software is prohibitively expensive - PDT provides a solution at a price business can afford.

EUR ING Robin Oldman, COO at PDT, writes and blogs on behalf of the company. Robin also manages the development of the user interface for the SPECIFY4IT tool-set that bridges the gap between the client user and the system supplier. The SPECIFY4IT tool-set is capable of delivering high-integrity business software faster and more cheaply than conventional development methods.