I stay away from anything that gets technical enough that my clients might have
the slightest confusion about, even if they're technical themselves. Getting
technical means your solving problems, instead you should be defining what those
problems are. It's generally quite hard to create solutions before you know the
problems.

Sometimes if I feel it's ultra necessary to document something behind the scenes
I'll add it to the prototype. Usually only if there is a choice to be made of
the next prototype page, but i keep it as simple as possible.

This is bad:
-----------------------
I check the "users" table in the database looking to see if the email address
and password they typed in matches up with the "email_addr" and "Pword" fields.
If I found a recordset I set the client variable to this user_id....
Links:
[Successful Login]
[Failed Login]

This is better:
-----------------------
I check to see if this user has been here before
Links:
[Successful Login]
[Failed Login]



Do you see the difference? The bad version is solving a problem, possibly
solving the wrong problem. The better version is presenting a problem to be
solved by the programmer. I'm sure there is an "even better" version than what i
have above.

Steve Nelson


Erki Esken wrote:

> I'm interested how do you guys capture the more complex business rules
> within the prototype phase? I think Hal said that he only prototypes the
> front-end pages, not back-end. And Steve (?) said he also creates the
> back-end pages that say something like "I add blah-blah-blah to the
> database, if all's OK I go HERE, if not I go HERE".
>
> Now how do you capture something that clients says about that back-end
> process? Like if the insertion process is made of multiple queries and
> if one fails all should be rolled back etc. Or if the client describes
> how the logic should work depending on different form selections etc.
> Do you just capture it in DevNotes attached to those back-end pages?
> Or do you create more elaborate docs that use UML or whatever to nail
> down the exact logic?
>
> .erki
>

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