Re: how is data arrived at in this table/column?

All great replies that I greatly appreciate...

best "most accurate" reply goes to Buck
best "best only possible way" goes to Jon
best "alternative approach" goes to Martin

seems i have not looked over some incredibly enhanced trace/analysis tool
that somehow magically logs critical calculations in a sequential flow for
output.



On Mon, Dec 10, 2018 at 12:58 PM Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

One reliable pointer to finding the business rules is to go have a cup
of coffee with the people who use the code every day. They won't know
everything, and they won't answer in complete paragraphs nor in proper
order, but chances are they will relate stories and offer comments that
will be invaluable when you do start digging. A good example came from
an episode years ago when someone casually said "Oh, don't forget,
anyone who took care of mr kelly's car during the depression gets a
nickle an hour more." Which saved a lot of digging... How do you
figure that one out from the code alone?


On 12/10/2018 11:44 AM, John Yeung wrote:

There is no shortcut, whether looking at a 20 year-old batch-based
system or a brand new system that was just deployed yesterday. As long
as the midrange market continues to treat documentation as the ugly wart
on the backside of software, brute force research is the only way to
extract business rules / knowledge from the code it is embedded within.

To be clear, the documentation story is deplorable for almost any
software on any platform.

And unfortunately, even when some effort has been put into
documentation, you really can't be sure it matches the code unless you
dig into the code as well as the documentation. Indeed, some portion
of the "how is this value calculated?" questions actually come from
already having consulted and understood the documentation. I.e. the
question is "why isn't the code behaving as the documentation says it
should?".

So all this is just to triple-underscore the beginning and end of
Buck's response. I think it would be just as accurate to say:

"There is no shortcut, whether looking at a 20 year-old batch-based
system or a brand new system that was just deployed yesterday. Brute
force research is the only way to extract business rules / knowledge
from the code it is embedded within."

Those tools other people were discussing can help in that process, but
ultimately it comes down to reading and understanding the code.

John Y.

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