Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

15.3. The Reporting Components

The requirements specified the following business reports required by the solution:

• New Accounts

• Activated Accounts

• Average Activation Time

• Aged Accounts

• Closed Accounts

The reporting components in this instance are nothing more than a set of stored procedures with simple queries that will be executed against the database. The stored procedures will provide the basic selection of information for the reports to be produced.

In almost all of the cases, the reports are simply used for trend analysis (for example, the number of accounts created, activated, and closed over time). The data in the database is actually encrypted, so "list" reports would not be possible without additional processing. This is a very common problem and it is one of the reasons that reports should be considered early. The earlier the reports can be identified, the easier it is to address both functional and technical issues. However, in this example, the reports essentially return a data series showing the individual counts per day over the time period. So, to support this basic type of reporting, the criteria would initially require:

• The start date for the report

• The end date for the report

The data series would typically be used to create a graph like the one shown in Figure 15-9

Figure 15.9. Figure 15-9

The following table provides the very basic selection criteria and comments ...