Skip to Main Content
Learning Oracle PL/SQL
book

Learning Oracle PL/SQL

by Bill Pribyl, Steven Feuerstein
November 2001
Beginner content levelBeginner
424 pages
11h 11m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning Oracle PL/SQL

9.1. Riding the Software Lifecycle

When you are faced with a new project, how do you begin?

When I was a young programmer, I remember reading a lot of books and papers that promoted different ways of designing and constructing programs. Often, authors presented the idea of a software lifecycle, which abstracts the overall software process into named phases. In hindsight, some of the ideas were pretty wacky, and about the only thing most authors agreed upon was that there should be a strong emphasis on defining the users' requirements: the more you know about what the users need, the easier the rest of the programming job will be. But that was the end of the agreement. Methods of eliciting and documenting these requirements, and of translating them into working systems, spanned an enormous philosophical chasm.

Today, after some (ahem) number of years as a software professional, I've had the chance to see a lot of the different things that people try to do, and I'm here to tell you that in the real world, the application of lifecycle thinking ranges from "disciplined" to "Huh?"

There do seem to be at least 10 job functions I've seen applied to custom development, although they don't necessarily occur in discrete phases. These functions are:

Definition of project scope

Textbook: Decision-makers draw functional boundaries around the required system.

Typical: Management decides how much they are willing to spend.

Project planning

Textbook: Project managers solicit staff input ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Learning Oracle PL/SQL

Learning Oracle PL/SQL

Darryl Hurley
Oracle PL/SQL Programming, Third Edition

Oracle PL/SQL Programming, Third Edition

Steven Feuerstein, Bill Pribyl

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596001800Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata