Hi, this is my first entry on here, I mainly joined to respond to some of the posts I see on here on advogato from some of my mates and to state some things too.

Well as my closest friends know (bjf,zealot), I have been working on a Intranet based brokering system for the last 6 odd months using Zope and dtml. Its been a roller coaster of loosely defined to undefined requirements, having to guess what the customer really wants. This has been a problem being a teleworker as I did not deal directly with the company we have been doing the project for, but rather I'm a third party in this. This lack of requirements and no design document, just a feel for what I felt was right, has lead to a system that the user has described as unusable, even after testing!?! IMHO, the system was not really right for them, they simply did not understand they way web systems and forms work. They wanted a point and click system where by they had one form and could dynamically select customers and about 10 other pieces of dynamic information (on a single form with over 200 pieces of information!), that's ok, but when a (db) table contains 200,000 data items, things tend to slow up with dynamic select boxes. Luckily we solved this problem by running everything through a hidden form, but IMHO it does not really work that great as they still have to wait while the hidden form loads and thus the user is stating its not quick enough.

Sadly there is a heap of problems that we have encountered along the way, but that is not the objective of this post, its to point out that having a good strategy for s/w development is, IMHO, necessary. It might not be the number one rule for producing quality s/w but at least you can be positive that you have followed a good set of standards. (Analysis paralysis is the other extreme).

Luckily, I have got some positives out of this project and it hasn't been for nothing, something my boss said to me today which cheered me up a lot,

"no one continues to work on something for this long under these circumstances just for a good reference.
But the greatest thing is the learning experience.

bjf talks of getting his life back in order and thats what I feel I need to do at the moment. Its not my fault directly that the customer has not got what they want, but my conscience make me feel that way.