Submission + - Is it bad design to have too many user roles?
Wanna Dogood writes: "Hello,
When I was a kid, I worked in a small store which had one cash register with 52 departments on it. The clerks could never figure out what department to sell the ball point pen under, the clients always came away figuring the clerks were dummies and the assistant manager became a bitter, frustrated woman trying to balance the daily accounting.
Today I am a grown-up programmer analyst who is now working with a client who is building an application with 56 user roles in it. The test team is inadequate to the task of checking if each user role has access to the functionality it is designed to access and no more.
I've been blessed with the task of writing up a risks document, and would like to justify that putting in too many user roles is simply a known bad software design practice, but I can't find any academic reference for this point.
Does anyone have a good reference for this problem?
Thank you for your time and patience,
WD"
When I was a kid, I worked in a small store which had one cash register with 52 departments on it. The clerks could never figure out what department to sell the ball point pen under, the clients always came away figuring the clerks were dummies and the assistant manager became a bitter, frustrated woman trying to balance the daily accounting.
Today I am a grown-up programmer analyst who is now working with a client who is building an application with 56 user roles in it. The test team is inadequate to the task of checking if each user role has access to the functionality it is designed to access and no more.
I've been blessed with the task of writing up a risks document, and would like to justify that putting in too many user roles is simply a known bad software design practice, but I can't find any academic reference for this point.
Does anyone have a good reference for this problem?
Thank you for your time and patience,
WD"
