hughk's Journal: Ooops, actually the project got canned!!!

I noticed the last 100 or so tests that I had sent to a BA/team leader have sat in review for the last week. This guy is normally quick, does he know something we don't? Anyway a big meeting had been scheduled for today to find out.

I arrived today to find our offshore vendor, a big one based out of the Carribean parceling up their documentation into binders. Not a good sign.

With all the aplomb of a teenie-bopper singing "whoops, I did it again", the project was announced as suspended and the external vendor was disengaging. This isn't a new thing here, few major projects actually get seen through to completion. Perhaps the bank could look at their project methodology here?

The external vendor can't be completely blamed in this case, they did produce late, but the specification was woolly as hell and almost no documented requirements. Not good when you have developers at a centre in Manila, a long way away from the business knowledge.

The real problem is deeper. If your developers are more than 10 minutes away, you really, really do want to have the requirements and specifications cast in stone. On a large system, you really want to get the architecture delivered first and then build upon that. Ideally, get the architecture done inhouse and then just outsource smaller sections of code even to multiple vendors.

Maybe they will restart the project. Amongst other things, this handles client reporting for the banks - something which is extremely important and a legal requirement. Without the new system the bank, a major one, needs to resort to paper. Oh dear!

Do you have decision or recommendation power?

[Inexile2002]

Because you saw this coming a mile away and it still happened. I would talk to you manager about the problems you're going to face when the auditors look at your failure to conform to legal requirements. Paper? At a bank. Not cool.

Re:Do you have decision or recommendation power?

[hughk]

I was on the QA side of the project so the only sign-off we had was the whether something worked or not. Although we did have the ability to make recommendations based on procedures.

We saw the first bad sign when we wnted to look at the requirements, which were almost impossible to find. The next was the 0.5 proof of concept was delivered from the developer with only 43% of the promised functionality there and even half of that wasn't working. It was so bad that we were told not to QA it, just to report o