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Painful System Changes Cartoons
Feel Powerful
2022-06-09
Piotr Kononow
Impact analysis is the process of determining what a change can break. Knowing that can make you feel powerful or terrified.
Just a small system update
2020-11-10
Do you know this that feeling of guilt that after phase of the extensive analysis, design, and implementation, you apply last minute changes or fixes without a trace in the documentation?
Team spent countless hours on documentation of requirements and the design, and just like that it becomes out of date and loses its value. And only because there was no time, budget, processes in place, or someone was just lazy.
Do you know that feeling that after a while of the release you have no idea how this system is supposed to work?
Well, the solution is quite simple, and yet so hard: keep your documentation up to date whenever system changes. Easier said than done.
Cautious dropping tables
2020-10-06
Sometimes even small changes can be scary if you're in the IT world. Making changes can leave you feeling like a color-blind bomb squad member... never knowing when you've cut the red wire
Remember that sales_temp tab?
2020-05-19
Do you know this? There’s this table and you have no idea what it is for – who created it, for what purpose, where does the data come from and what it’s being used for. Can we use it for this report or should we simply drop it? If only we had who to ask about this...
Solution is simple – create a documentation repository, assign objects to people and functional areas, ask your team to provide even basic descriptions. And share this documentation.
Changing requirements
2018-11-09
One of the reasons that IT systems and databases become convoluted are changing requirements. Table created for one purpose might have changed it a couple of times and now its name is irrelevant and misleading.
Database for pet clinic
2018-10-29
Packaged applications have their own names for entities and attributes that may differ from the ones used in your organization. This may pose a challenge with reporting.