Feb 13
News are spreading fast, Ryanair will suspend it’s booking service for 4 (that is four) days! Due to the new Office of Fair Trading rule, airlines are obliged to show their air taxes to customers.
For reasons unknown Ryanair will make these changes (even weeks later then the original deadline) while their booking system is offline. They won’t take any bookings online nor through their phone systems. As pointed out in the the article, they might have just as well place a link on their frontpage to easyJet.com.
Is it just another IT project failure? Might be so. It is clear that Ryanair didn’t plan this well and as Deri Jones (CEO of web application testing specialist SciVisum) says:
Ryanair are not stupid, so there must be some logic to this excessive downtime. It is possible that careful cost management - one of their trademarks - has resulted in under-delivery online, and they are simply paying the price for not having planned and executed better on this change
Oct 05
Requirements engineering form an important part of the Software Development Life Cycle. Over the years methodologies have changed, the whole SDLC changed and got replaced. Below is a diagram about the past and present approaches of the SDLC:
1. Requirements Engineering
2. Analysis
3. Design
4. Implementation (incl. testing)
The diagram clearly shows the difference between the time and effort. If you put a sufficient effort into the requirements engineering right in the beginning of your development (yes that includes investing much more money into it as well) means that as you proceed on with the projects the less effort it takes to e.g. maintain the software being created. Whereas in older approaches less effort was put into the RE therefore making the implementation a nightmare. That meant, not gathering enough information caused many side-effects that needed to be corrected at the end of the project life cycle.
RE is not only important because of effort and time measures but the diagram also implies that if you spend more money on the RE then you have lower costs on the final stage. Assume you did not gather the necessary requirements in the first place, and you need to hire additional developers to keep up with the work-phase, it would really increase your costs.