A Conversation with Elizabeth
1998
What will you do when you grow up?

From:          LMixson
To:            Elizabeth
Sent:          Tuesday, April 21, 1998 1:06 PM
Subject:       What will you do when you grow up?
 
I had always found that other people's opinions about professors, courses and exams are not worth much.  It was a good thing you didn't listen to the other student and knew your lists.  I am glad you did well.
 
College is so different from the "real world".  Taking a course has a known start time, duration and well defined content and cycle.  In the work world you seldom have well defined start times, duration's and if you do then they are likely to change half way though.  Also the three month semester is short and concise where I often will have projects that may take 6 months, a year or possible longer. 
 
No I have not heard back from Wendy yet.
 
What do I do?  Software and systems integration in short.  My current project is a typical cycle.  I spend several weeks (months for longer projects) doing requirements analysis.  This usually involves many meetings with the customer, find out what they want, when they want it, how much they can spend and then many hours analyzing their business process with the result a "Requirements Analysis" document.  The next phase is the proposal phase in which a high level design is done and a proposed solution is presented in a "Proposal" document.  This phase often requires a lot of research for various products and vendors that might "off the shelf" meet some or all of the requirements.  Typically the "systems integration" involves both hardware and software so a lot of time is spent with vendors.  For my current project I researched about ten software image products, narrowed my "short list" down to about four, talked extensively to those vendors, narrowed it down to two, more talks and product demos and finally a final recommendation.  This was just for one of the five major components of the system.  Next phase is the detail design phase in which the details of how the hardware and software will be configured.  This is where the "graphical user interface" (GUI) is defined and in the case of software the details of each software program is designed.  The detail design specification is typically the result.  For my current project this will only be about 150 pages as much of the system is commercial off-the-shelf (COTS).  The next system is implementation in which the custom software is written, the COTS is installed and configured.   Then comes integration in which each of the sub-components are integrated together.  Then comes testing followed by an acceptance test by the customer.  Then comes installation, more testing on site followed by training and, some day, actually going "live" operation.  I typically do a lot in the requirements, and design phases,  I also typically write many of the documents, requirements, design, testing, acceptance test, implementation plan, are just a few.  I also typically do the primary interface between our company and the customer which means a lot of reviews along the way, requirements, design, weekly status, etc.  I have to go now as I am going to the customer to present alternative solutions for the document capture subsystem. 
 
Larry

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