On Tue, 20 Oct 2020 17:36:07 +0200, A. Dumas wrote:

> On 20-10-2020 17:20, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>> On the subject of white boards, by astonishment was in the pure
>> snowflakeness of the man who cant do without a whiteboard.
>
> Whiteboards or blackboards or chalkboards have of course been *very*
> long standing tools in education, discussion, explanation, problem
> solving and who knows what other kinds of collaborations &
> communications.
>
Agreed, and very useful they are to. When we designed the Radio 3 Music
Planning system in 1980. This used easily the most complex database I've
worked on, because, apart from including complete catalogues of composers
and their works, and of performers and orchestras, it supported all
aspects of music program production as well as keeping track of the fees
paid to performers and repeat fees (payable if a piece was rebroadcast)
and of any resulting free-for-repeat items. It goes without saying that
the system had to be easy to use by the small team in the planning office
but it also had a larger population of casual users, e.g. producers who
needed to make sure that their next project didn't use the same
performers playing the same works as anything else planned close to their
target date.

The first thing we did was to teach the non-IT team members, a senior
member of the user dept and the project manager, how to read a Data
Structure Diagram. We then all spent the next three weeks defining what
the system would have to do and adjusting the database schema to handle
these requirements. At the end of that, we had a data structure that we
all agreed could do what was needed, a comprehensive list of required
functions and a good idea of how to organise programming: both the online
element and printed reports.

This worked out well: we froze the whiteboard as it was at that point
and, slightly to my surprise, it was still an exact match on the database
schema of the completed system when  that went live. Yes, we did check
that.

As a result, I've been a fan of whiteboards as a design tool ever since.

In case you're wondering, the system ran on an ICL 2966, was written in
COBOL, and used IDMSX as its database. We never counted code lines, but
the music catalogue in the database contained over 40,000 musical works,
many of which had at least 3-4 parts (operas and song cycles have tens of
parts) and a surprising number of works have several versions written by
the composer as well as a whole slew of adaptations and re-orchestrations
written by other people.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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