My team and I just met up with our Professor for our big semester project on Database Design & Management. We got our stuff pulled together and walked into his office with our heads held high, ready to present the elaborate, complex model of the system we intended to build for our client… only for our Professor to ask to see our “user views”, a small intermediary part of the database design process, which we didn’t work on and therefore couldn’t show him. Alas, he says that without the user views, we can’t move forward and our system design efforts are (almost completely) futile.
All along, we’d been basing our design off of a conceptual framework that wasn’t necessarily build-able (the whole point of the project was to conceptualize and then build the model). Now my team and I have got to work backwards, with a chance that all the hard work we had put into the design will be going down the drain. That is, if our user views dictate that our design is not suitable to be built (no matter how terrific the abstraction of our model is), we’re back to the drawing board! Ouch.
Lesson of the day? Don’t get ahead of yourself! Intermediary steps in a complex project sometimes seem dispensable, but oftentimes, they’re there for a reason 🙂
