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Showing posts from November, 2014

Dig a Little Deeper

Be sure to separate symptoms of a problem from the problem itself.   This can sometimes be harder than it seems.   Sometimes the problem is a few layers below the surface.   For example, assume you get the following issue reports and feature requests: 1.      Please add a button to all list screens to export data to Excel. 2.      Whenever running a query that returns a lot of data (e.g. 10K rows) the list screens take a long time to return. 3.      We’d like to be able to run very basic (read-only) queries by linking to some tables through MS Access.   But in order to do that we need an Oracle client installed on our machine.   We also need a username/password for the database. 4.      Please add “week ending” and “month” to the return fields for all list screens. On the surface these seem like simple, disparate problems to be solved.   So you might come up with solutions like this: 1.      “Sure – we can add an export button”. 2.      “Hmmm – we’ll