Tourism shop back office system

A simple shop example system, for a university course.

More information

Imagine how quickly it's possible to knock together a web based system with a few forms and two user types - surely it shouldn't take more than a few evenings of hacking away. And now, imagine the same, but with every form, every state transition, every validation needing to be formally described. That was largely what the university course in question consisted of.

What I did

While the screenshot might make the system look rather simple, which it arguably was, there were about 50 pages of documentation, state transition graphs, information about validations and every possible parameter. It's surprising that I actually had enough time to finish the system due to all of these docs, given that not everyone in my course was so lucky.

What I learnt

Red tape will often be the antithesis of getting things done. In certain cases, that can be just the way things are (e.g. when writing software for an airplane), but it also becomes immediately obvious why that's not the case for the majority of systems out there. Nobody wants a formally proven system 5 years from now, they want something that will let them be the first to the market and something that they can deploy 6 months from now.