On Jul 26, 2013, at 3:01 AM, Michael Brunnbauer wrote:
Are you refering to a specific example with those labels or are M0760 and
MENSA-FL just arbitrary ?
John Sowa opened the door to the issue/opportunity/challenge of legacy systems & I running with it.
One of the major challenges with legacy systems is the semantics of what cryptic labels actually mean. These are systems that have typically been in active use & modification for multiple decades.
The fact that the name of something does not have to be related to the actual contents of the field/column/data element is another topic altogether. In an ideal world the name/label & the contents would be highly congruent, but often they're not. Separate topic.
Yes... these labels (names) are 100% real.
The M0760 was heritage from what I assume to have been a Fortran based system (this was a life insurance company where the actuarial process was the first to be automated with Fortran, a usage that remains to this day). In the early days of Fortran I believe variable names were restricted to 6 characters.
This field (field = column = data element, etc.) M0760 was "obviously" from the Masterfile (remember those?), in the 7th segment, 60th field.
I do not know if they went all the way to M9999, but the print-out of the file layout was 64 pages long, approximately 1700 fields.
Decades pass, technology advances, COBOL arrives & stabilizes & now they have an identical master file, but with a different naming convention. Now the data represented by M0760 has been relabeled to MENSA-FL. (Actually it was MSTR-MENSA-FL, but we're going to ignore the MSTR part.) MENSA is not the word for smart people, but rather an acronym meaning MEssage Notify Stop Action FLag... a collection of dunning flags.
In actual practice M0760 and MENSA-FL were exact equals (think base & displacement in a file structure), except newer programs could use the COBOL names, while older programs (still the same masterfile) used the M0760 style.
Now... if you've gotten this far... that was just the administrivia, background.
Now we inject the human element. I spent 6 months of my life futzing with this stuff. Since I was working on the new side of the system, I learned about MENSA-FL. A little opaque, but not too hard to memorize.
But at one point I needed to consult with the SME, the expert. I chattered away about MENSA this & MENSA that until I noticed he was not following me. There was a pause. Then he offered: "Oh! You mean M0760. Now I understand what you're talking about."
He'd been working at this firm his entire life & essentially memorized most of the M0101 to M9999 meanings. MENSA-FL was simply not something he understood.
Welcome to the world of legacy systems.
Now how does SW help with that sort of opaque, ugly labels issue? People working with legacy systems wrestle with this issue every single day. How does SW help?
The ugly labels are not going away. On balance you cannot change them since people have memorized them—particularly the SMEs. These are systems that have decades of life under their belt & likely will survive for decades more.
Is there a SW mechanism or process that speeds up the DISCOVERY process for newbies?