Archiving old transations

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Jonathan (and others)

Can I make a suggestion here? << I've worn all the hats from analyst 
working with the users, system designer, coder, tester, etc.)

The FIRST step is to get together a group of USERS plus an "analyst" (I 
might volunteer) to decide on what is needed here and its exact 
specification from a user point of view (what this thing should DO). 
Absolutely no need/use for code developers at this stage and in fact 
thinking even vaguely about "how would this functionality be 
implemented?" counter productive. Please note, the job of the analyst is 
NOT to tell the users what they want. The users do know what they want 
BUT that won't become well defined until the experienced analyst 
questions them about all the necessary pieces which they won't think of 
all by themselves. In the finished product, perhaps 80% of the code will 
be devoted to handling exceptional conditions, all things that will not 
all by themselves come to the users' minds until they have encountered 
this or that exception. It's the job of the analyst to envision all of 
these "problems" and have the users decide "what should the program do 
if ....(some unusual situation)"

UNLESS it is done this way (if the task is given directly to the coders) 
the users will NOT end be up being satisfied. In "real world" projects 
this user design phase might take up 20% of the total project time.

For example, I would NOT have even imagined "archive" meant what you 
seem to think it does. I would have approached it VERY differently with 
the action "archive before date X" to mean make a NEW copy of the books 
with all transaction prior to X reduced to a single entry in each ledger 
account labeled "balance as of X", rename the old set of books appending 
"archived on X" to the file name, and then the new books to the original 
name.

Michael D Novack, FLMI