| Stories that might help. Back in the 1980s I was tasked with writing a system to use a handheld computer to track the manual inspection of Fire Equipment (Extinguishers, Hoses, etc) at various locations across fossil fuel based generating stations. The very first version was hard-coded to the questions they supplied. My initial estimate was 1 month, it took 2. It met the requirements we agreed to, but it was totally unusable. Any changes to the questions required changes to the source code. I ended up providing them with a set of forms they could use to edit questions. (This is back in the days of MS-DOS, so it was all in a TUI). To handle the ability to actually add/remove questions, I provided a set of choices for question types (Yes/No, or a number) Then I provided 2 options, the step number to go to if the right answer was given, and the step to go to if the wrong answer was given. It wasn't perfectly safe, they could jump to a non-existent step number, but it was easy to comprehend, so they didn't have issues fixing their own errors. It worked well enough to set up for 10 other stations, and paid my bills for a few years. --- Another time, the Account Managers at the Consulting Firm I worked at wanted a number of reports, all of the same general format, but with specifications that varied all over the map. I built an SQL Query generator for them in Microsoft Access, that built (based on their selections) and showed (and allowed them to directly edit) the resulting SQL query. They were then able to cut/paste and save the queries that they liked, and build new ones on the fly. --- If you can build a tool for them that lets them define some event, then a series of steps that should happen afterwards... they can manage the business logic directly. Your task isn't to make it perfectly safe, but transparent enough so they can understand and build a mental model of how it acts, so they can manipulate it safely. They need to be able to see the current rules, and perhaps even play with them in a reversible way, to test out new ideas. |