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This is not a job posting. I wouldn't wish this job on a friend, and I
consider all of you friends--almost all, anyway. What I'm looking for is
help in crafting a job description that I will post elsewhere.
Here's the situation:
I have a client-from-hell who nonetheless pays well; so I keep doing
stuff for her. The current challenge is that she (big-right-brain,
non-linear, writing-challenged person that she is) is the SME for a
software product she has conceived and is trying to extrude from her
head onto paper, so it can be developed. She is in LA, I am in New
Haven, and I can hear her waving her hands over the phone. She's not
really an email person.
I've captured as many of the functional requirements as I can. However
the business logic layer is a highly complex expert system.
At one point a few years ago, someone the client hired did some
flowcharts to try to represent the logic of the system. I'm not
convinced either that a logic flowchart is the best way to represent the
system or to communicate it to today's developers. But I'm also not sure
that it isn't.
I know we've had many threads on other ways of representing systems
graphically, varying with the frame of reference--UML(?), DFD, etc. I'm
not adept at any of them, and there's the hand-waving thing and the
client-from-hell personality thing that also mitigate against my doing
this part of the job myself.
So I know I need to find someone who is patient and skilled at
extracting information from a difficult SME and who can work
face-to-face with her in LA for the several days it will take to extract
the information from her. But what I don't know is what technical skills
I'm looking for in terms of the best way to represent an expert system.
To clarify, this is for a functional spec, not a design spec. So the
idea is to represent the needed logic at an abstract level, not to
specify the design of the system to implement it.
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